ACT III

Last year was a milestone for us. Of course, the 50^th Class Reunion was a real biggy! However, do you all catch yourselves asking “What’s Next”? I do. Now we also are in the zone of making resolutions for the coming year. I catch myself saying this is really going to be my year! My year for what? What is it I wish to do now in Act III of my life? And will I be physically able to do it? After all, didn’t I just have a heart attack two months ago? Is it too late to accomplish anything of any significance? Lots of questions!

A year or so ago I watched Jane Fonda being interviewed by Larry King. (I hated her – she looked so youthful and glamorous, and she’s older than we are!) She captured my attention when she spoke to him about how she looks at the stages of her life. To paraphrase what she said, life is one long drama – like a three-act Broadway play. In today’s world of better health, fitness, and medical advances, it’s feasible that each of us can live to an average age of 90. If you divide that by three, the first thirty years of our life is Act I, the second 30 years is Act II, and at age 60, each of us began the Third Act of our life drama. Jane went on to say that typically, in a three-act play, the Third Act is the time the whole play “comes together”, starts making sense, and reaches the conclusion.

Hey guys! We are well into Act III! Is it making sense yet? Are we solving the mystery; is good winning out? Are we getting our just rewards? Are we finally reaching a pinnacle of sorts? What kind of drama are you acting in? What is your role?

Marianne Williamson has written some books in the past that put a new spin on my outlook as a woman. (i.e., “A Woman’s Worth”) This morning I received an email from a publishing house I subscribe to regarding her newest book. I haven’t read it yet, but the excerpt sounds intriguing. Especially with the questions I (and maybe you) have been asking myself about “the future”. Here is the excerpt I read:

“Sometimes what we appear to have lost is simply something it was time to leave behind. Perhaps our system just lets something go, our having moved through the experience and now needing it no more. A friend of mine was sitting once with two of his best friends, a couple he'd partied long and hard with during the 1960s. At about ten in the evening the couple's twenty something daughter came home, saw them on the couch, and admonished them, "You guys are so boring! You never go out!" To which all three responded in unison, "We were out, and now we're in."

The mind is its own kind of dance floor. What this generation could do from our rocking chairs could literally rock the world. If in fact the highest, most creative work is the work of consciousness, then in slowing down we're not doing less; we're doing more. Having slowed down physically, we're in a better space to rev up psychically. We are becoming contemplative. We are shifting from the outer to the inner not in order to begin our demise, but to reseed and regreen the consciousness of the planet. And that's what is happening now: We're going slower in order to go deeper, in order to go faster in the direction of urgently needed change.” ……………Marianne Williamson, ”The Age of Miracles”

My fascination with the old familiar places, structures, and buildings in this town stems from a fear of losing something of value in a place where I experienced such joy at an important time in my life. Just as we are losing so much of our planet – the ice caps, the rainforests, the water tables, the animals, etc., due to our neglect and/or misuse of the earth’s resources, I feel a certain amount of pain when I see small towns like Ballinger starting to decay. I feel an urgency to capture some of these old structures before it is too late.

Many have done so before. I recently heard that Jerry Eoff’s mother was among those responsible for saving the Carnegie Library, and even a huge painted sign on the side of a brick building downtown. She helped save an old stone church, also. I plan to photograph more of these and post them in the near future.

From one of my daily inspirational readings, this one from “A Cherokee Feast of Days” by Joyce Sequichie Hifler:

“All that has been a part of the important past is a part of this more important present. We are bits and pieces of who we were yesterday and all the many yesterdays..This is the turning point, the place where we begin to see over the hill and around the bend… What might have been cannot govern or grieve us… Better, happier and more joy-filled times are looking for us. And they have found us.”

I’m not certain what all this reflection I am experiencing will amount to, but it won’t go away. I leave you with this question from a little game I like to play sometimes. It’s called “If”:

“If you had the ability to change three things in this world, what would you change?" Think about it. Can we still “rock the world”? 

Good Stuff Happens,

Marilyn