Linda is coming upon her fourth work anniversary and with it she gets an additional week of vacation, totaling five weeks altogether, which is very generous. But what is ironic about getting that much time off is that we have not used it to travel anywhere for the last year and do not plan to do so anytime soon, especially now that we live at a lighthouse. All of which is a fulfillment of a longtime goal that was to create a life we do not need a vacation from.
As longtime residents of Florida who were born and bred in the south, we used to vacation in New England and dream of escaping the heat and humidity to live here one day. So now that we do we are savoring the changing of the seasons, including early snowfalls like the one we got here the other day and is pictured above. There is nothing quite like watching snow swirling around you on all sides and feeling like you live inside a snow globe built for two.
And speaking of seasons, Linda and I have been thinking lately about the temporality of life and how it helps to embrace such a mindset, especially when dealing with life’s setbacks. Consequently, one of my favorite biblical phrases has become, “and it came to pass.” Also, our experience has been that even relationships tend to come with expiration dates. And coming to terms with that ebb and flow of people in our lives keeps us from artificially sustaining them.
Like so much of life, the maintaining of relationships is a cyclical endeavor that requires letting go of ones that have fulfilled their purpose for a specific time period. I cannot speak for others but I have learned the hard way that streamlining one’s life also means relinquishing memories of what used to be in order to move ahead in our lives. And that is okay, for it is the nature of changing seasons.