Rollerbag Goddess Global Communications

I recently had a dream that I was in the jungle outside a house, enjoying a walk among the damp foliage after a rainstorm, soaking in the cool night air. But then I noticed I wasn’t alone. Several sets of eyes were upon me, with partially-obscured shapes tucked among the bushes and trees. Lions and lionesses. Their menacing stares followed me as I turned around and headed back toward the house. The biggest of the lions followed me, a massive golden mane framing his face. He walked just a few feet behind me, within striking range.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality these days, as this little peek into my subconscious clearly conveys. But this isn’t a new preoccupation. I’ve contemplated mortality since an early age; does that make me odd? As a young girl, I’d spend my allowance on a fruit pie and bike to the cemetery, where I would sit in the peace–far from the chaos of a household of six–and watch the monarch butterflies while munching my snack. One of my favorite memories of secondary school was the day our poetry teacher took us to the cemetery to write poetry in the style of Emily Dickinson. The headstones were as cold as the Minnesota fall air, and I was happy.

I distinctly remember mourning the end of my childhood when I turned 12. And I had a pervasive feeling that I would die young. I was strangely comfortable with this notion.

Around that time I was swimming at one of Minnesota’s pristine lakes when a boy I had a crush on approached. (Scandal: the town minister’s son! He would breakdance in our front yard, the common courting ritual of the 80s, which led me to believe the feeling was mutual.) He asked if I wanted to swim out to a floating dock where the older kids were hanging out. Though I’d taken swimming lessons, I wasn’t a seasoned swimmer. Partway out to the float I dipped down to try to touch the lake bottom, and instead felt the tops of thick weeds and realized in panic that I was well over my head. I swallowed water and struggled to stay afloat. My crush quickly pushed me toward shore and I was forced to watch, humbled, as he swam back out alone.

More than a decade later, my friend Brenda and I were driving after a late news shift on Wisconsin’s infamous “bloody” highway 29 at 1 a.m. and narrowly missed an overturned jeep in our lane. When we came to a stop and caught our breath, I was surprised. I was surprised because I didn’t expect to still be alive. I was 24.

Since then, I’ve had a breast cancer scare, a ruptured appendix, and some hair-raising transport all over the world; a person can’t help but wonder when their good fortune will run dry. But it doesn’t bother me in general; I’m comfortable with the concept of my own mortality and I think I’m rather realistic about it.

I guess I didn’t realize how atypical musing about mortality is until I posted a poem that touched on the themes of aging and change, and several people reached out to see if I was okay. (I am.) If I am indeed an island with shifting shores and rising waters, I’m an island at peace with the notion that the waters will eventually drown me. Contemplating this reality helps me make more informed decisions about how I live my “one wild and precious life.”

I think that’s at the root of why I’ve felt a sense of urgency related to travel, because life in my mind is so fleeting and time is so short. Why wouldn’t you run full speed toward that which you love, the thing that you must do? Why wouldn’t you prioritize it in your life? Why wouldn’t you sacrifice everything for it? When you consider how brief our lives really are, that to me is reason enough, but add to that the startling truth of the temporariness of literally everything, and wasting any time on the meaningless demands of this world seems utterly and completely foolish indeed. I recall sitting in four-hour corporate meetings, surrounded by workaholics who would drone on about inane matters and how to squeeze money out of people who bounced checks, wondering why they couldn’t see what a criminal waste of a good life it was. I left that job before I became a victim of redundancy in a corporate takeover, and hopped a flight to Europe on my first trip abroad, solo.

These days, I’ve been dealing with the mundane, all-too-common pops, creaks and insults of middle-age. They are for me a reminder of why there’s no time to waste. Not if you want a life well-lived. Not if you have goals outside of the ones that yield power or money. I’m talking about the goals that speak to your soul, the whispers you’ve heard in your heart your whole life, that may have grown quieter over the years as you’ve shushed them but have never ceased. I hope you feel the urgency to answer them now, even if you have to go it alone; time after all is short. In spite of all the years we deplete chasing money, power, fame and material garbage, they’ll never fulfill those dreams. Instead they’ll greedily gnaw a lifetime down to a miserable stub, at which point too many people can only quiet the voices by counting the coins for which they traded the best years of their lives, and rage voting for someone they believe will dismantle the structures which they helped reinforce. I cannot be a fan of a system that forces people to live on means so meagre they must work every day until they die, a system which intentionally bankrupts us just as the first spade of dirt is dug for our graves.

I knew if I ran, the lion behind me would attack, so I walked slowly but deliberately until I was back in the house, and latched the door safely behind me. It was only a dream, but I’d avoided the grand eclipse yet again. Precisely how I will go doesn’t haunt me, because inevitably it will be something, and probably something I never anticipated, so why waste the time.

What haunts me isn’t how I will go, but rather where I will go. Next.

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