Now What?

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

This Tuesday past, at 12:40 pm local time, I landed in St. Thomas.  I stepped off the plane into a wall of humidity, a California girl suddenly transported to another world entirely, an aging, white-haired Alice in a new Wonderland.  I had gotten what I had wanted – this life on the water, this love, this chance to be myself as I had never been, to know myself as I never had.  Adrenaline and single-mindedness, along with the surety that I wouldn’t survive the old life I was living for more than a few years, a decade at most (longings for death do tend to be realized when the heart is broken in the ways mine had been), got me here.  I stood on the tarmac to get my bearings, moved resolutely with my carryon because that’s what one does, but at the core of me, beating the rhythm of my own heart was this simple question – “Now what?”  What happens when you get what you want?

I suspect you know the answer already.  However, the Sue that stepped off the plane at the St. Thomas airport was emotionally drained from leaving her marriage and her beloved child, college-aged it’s true, but her primary focus for the last 18 years.  For the first time in years she chose her own happiness over everyone else’s in what still feels to her like the epitome of selfishness.  That Sue wasn’t so clever.  She boarded the boat, which was now her home sleepy and stunned.  She went through the motions the next few days, sometimes almost feeling a part of it, at other times feeling like someone on vacation, heading away after a specified span.  And beneath it all her heart beating in this new rhythm of “what now,” “what now?”

Fast-forward to Friday morning.  An intense squall and an open port have led to wet clothes and a mess of spilled heart meds, somehow opened (thanks TSA) and now dissolved onto pants and shirts.  I start to cry, all the joy and strangeness of the last few days, the frustration that always comes when you are on a steep learning curve trying to master a new life (sailing) by immersing myself in it, a foreigner trying to become a native speaker, finally let loose.  These are happy tears and sad ones, tears of frustration and anger, at myself, at the open 

port, at the TSA.  I cry as I have seldom cried these last few months except the few days before leaving Sacramento for good.  I can’t seem to stop myself.  Tears just keep welling and rolling down my cheeks as I try to deal with the mess and stow for our journey to the other end of the island.  I don’t Bryan to see me like this.  I have pretended for months I am not at my edge trying to tie up the loose ends of one life so I can move to this other.  Now here is the clear evidence of that edge and my own fragility.  I so want to be a strong woman and am never as strong as I hope to be.

Of course he sees the tears, comforts and calms me, telling me things I know but which sound a lot more reasonable coming from a third party.  This is how it’s going to be for a while, I think to myself.  And underneath all the tears and the soothing words is that heartbeat of “now what,” “now what?”

Somewhere along the sail to Christmas Cove, the answer comes to me at last.  I know what you do when you get what you want – you live, and you do your best to be grateful, the key way of that being to enjoy it.  For the first time in years, there’s nothing on the horizon to long for.  Besides visits from my daughter and possibly having her make her home near, there’s nothing else I want.  I have a man I love and who loves me.  We are well matched in every way, a rare and wondrous blessing.  I have the ocean and the wind, the beautiful islands, the strange music of it that is carried in the voices of the people.  I have months ahead without work, three of them, the first break this long I have had since my heart attack recovery.  There’s nothing else I want.  Besides my early childhood, has there ever been a time I could have said this and meant it as completely as I do right now.  All that is required of me is to live this life, to be happy, and to appreciate how blessed I am.  My heartbeats become heartbeats again and a peace settles over me.  If I can make my heart’s desire come true, if I can manifest love and this life, then surely I can learn to appreciate my blessings, be happy, and thank the gods for all I have been given.

There will be days I lose my equanimity.  There will be days of sorrow over the good things in the old life I gave up, even as I try to make them a part of this new life.  Sometimes it works, mixing old and new, and sometimes it doesn’t.  But mostly, I get to be happy and the wise thing to do is to enjoy it fully.  May it be so.