Letting Our Selves Go

 As we traveled great distances by car in the past week, it made me think of other trips I've taken.  In some ways, not much has changed.  There are still times of singing along with times of deep conversation.  There's boredom when the scenery is essentially the same for mile after mile.  And then, there's my internal thought process.

On road trips that I took in college, I'd gaze out the window and wonder about the people living in the houses that we zoomed by.  I would wonder if I would ever own a house.  I'd daydream about owning a house and some land and what we could do to sustain ourselves.  My fellow travelers suggested growing Christmas trees on the land.  Even then, especially then in the wake of the 1980's farm crises, we knew that family farming was too hard.

As we traveled this past week, we drove by farm after farm, some tiny and some industrial in scope.  It made me think of my earlier dreams of owning a small farm just like the ones I was seeing out of the car window.  Why is it so easy to let some of my past goals go, while others feel like defeats?

I'm thinking of various people I've known throughout my years of teaching, so many of whom have retired.  And here I am, still hoping for a dream job, even as I'm preparing for other possibilities and wondering how anyone ever decides they can afford to retire.

I'm thinking of writing hopes that still pop up, especially when I see others getting first book deals or second or third book publications.  I've long given up on the idea of novels that get bought for screenplays.  I still think about a volume of poems.  But then part of me wonders why I do.  I know all the depressing stats on who reads poems and publishers going out of business.  But the English major side of me wants that faint hope of preservation of my written work, more specifically, the poems.  

I think of this idea of letting ourselves go, our past selves that no longer fit, those past goals that no longer fit.  It's hard to know when to let go and when to push on.  I'm thinking in terms of creative work, but also in terms of paid work and also in terms of body work.  Being on the road also gave me time to think about how creaky my body has become, especially as I got out of the car and limped to the picnic area.  Is this just part of aging or should I be doing more to try to offset the ways my body wants to ache?

It's a different kind of midlife crisis than the kinds we often hear about--when to let go, when to push harder, when to change course, when to keep going.