When my full-time job vanished in October, I was incensed. How dare they take away something that was mine for a decade? I ‘owned’ my projects, nurturing them from conception, through birth, and into a robust and healthy adulthood.
They belonged to me.
But they didn’t. They were simply on loan.
It’s easy to forget that everything we are and do is borrowed. Our homes, our families, our jobs, even our lives are limited time offers with unknown expiration dates.
We know the bargain; we just choose to look away from it.
My latest milestone was a new reminder of an old truth; something bigger than any particular job or any specific time or place.
It is the obligation to celebrate that which is ours to keep; the many small, intangible, intimate things that shape our lives. Our impact on others; the way we raise our children; the friendships we make; the ideas we create; these can endure and spread, replicate and expand. They represent us. They are not borrowed. And they find life only in being lent to others.
We’ll have to give something else up sometime soon. It’s inevitable. But it is somehow reassuring to remember that the more we build, the more we bring to whatever lies ahead.