Not Magnificent Indeed...

"And at once I knew, I was not magnificent." It is the chorus to a Bon Iver song that plays in my head again and again. It is the anthem of my miniature mid-life crisis. How I knew, suddenly at 40, that my life, my accomplishments, amount to nothing special, except if you count the lives I have begotten, the little lights that are my two sons but for whom I can hardly take credit.

But at 40 and a half, I find that it is also a promise. Not being magnificent, that is. It is a promise that is sustaining and which creates peace in the heart, in the mind. It means that though my life represents an individual wave that swells in the sea, drags itself along the ocean floor to take its unique shape against an offshore wind, though I arc and curl around the barrel of my own hollowness, crush it with the weight of my watery mass, I am ultimately, undeniably, a part of the sea, indistinguishable from the vast expanse of saltwater that encompasses all else under the sun. Undeniably not separate and alone, as I might at times believe (or even desire to assert).

I find now that it is a comfort that I have the expanse of the entire sea to fall back into when the peak of my life folds into whitewater, then foam, then the receding calm that it was always becoming. Indeed, has always been.