I worked last week for a customer I’ve had for many years, she still works full-time as a practicing attorney at 79 years-old and she is still madly in love with her husband of 46 years.  While I cleaned and organized linen cupboards she chatted about her work, her life, her family, and she shared stories of some of the many travels and adventures she’s had during the years of her marriage, which are the entire years of my life.  I felt a mix of happiness and hopefulness those hours in her company…happy that I love my job and that I enjoy so many of my customers, and hopeful that my time to really live, will come…that it is not too late for me, that nothing is too late for me, that I’ve not missed the boat or the bus, that no doors have closed, that it’s not too late for me for anything…

I’ve been thinking a lot the last couple of months about the life I am living: Am I living well, or just, well, living?  By global standards, I live lavishly, if I make the mistake of “comparing” my life to those for whom I work,  I do not.  If I focus on what I have and what is good and what is happy, I can safely write that I live well and have a very good life.  If I focus on the few things I want that I have not got, I find my view becomes narrower and narrower day after day and I begin to feel that I am  simply existing and not living really or living fully at all.  Anybody who knows me, knows that I use the word “fabulous” a lot…how am I today?  Fabulous! …but my propensity to too frequently dwell on the few -have nots-  rather than the many -haves- of my life, makes me anything but fabulous.  It is a self-perpetuating cycle of occasional unease and upset that only I can break.  Nobody can fix this flaw but me.

During the work hours I kept saying to myself, ‘I am this happy, I am this satisfied, I am as content as this woman’…just because I don’t yet have the money or the freedom to travel like I wish to, and just because I’ve got a few nagging thoughts that irk me, does not make me any less “well” than she.  My unease about a few things I can’t change somehow begins to make me uneasy about everything, even things I CAN change.  I am in charge of my own joy.  I am the captain of my ship, I am the mistress of my domain, I am the boss of me, so I must wonder why I keep thinking about WHEN things might be different, when I know, I honestly know, that I am in charge of me.  My happiness, my contentment, my satisfaction, my ease…I am the creator of my joy and therefore I am the creator of my woe…things can be different JUST by changing the way I think about them…

I’ve never heard this customer say one bad thing, one negative thing, one not “happy” thing about her life, her husband, her work…she is totally at ease with all that is her world.   I am in charge of the rainbows and butterflies…it is up to me to find them even when they are in hiding.  This customer is as in love with her house as I am mine…she loves its design, its layout, the treasures she has accumulated in it, she feels most “right” when she is there…she feels most herself when she is there, it is her space to regroup and restore her soul after her long week of work in the city.  I realized in talking with her that her joy upon arriving at the shore is not much different from my joy when I get to the base of my driveway at the end of each work day.  I suppose much like Dorothy, even if I got over the rainbow I might find that there’s no place like home, that Oz is just some other place, not some better place…