Today is my 50th birthday.
When I was 16, my mother, with a great deal of help from my best friend Anne, threw me a surprise birthday party. It was, as it turns out, the first and only surprise party I have ever had. It was a warm, humid summer day and we had spent the morning having a tennis lesson at the home of a family friend. Normally, after our weekly lesson, we piled into the Country Squire Station Wagon and headed home with a usual stop at the Grand Union. On this day, however, we lingered for a bit, sipping ice cold lemonade under the trees of her very substantial and magnificent back yard.
When we arrived back home, Mom sent me down to the basement to collect a pan so that she could bake my birthday cake. I skipped down the stairs, two at a time, singing a jingle that had gotten stuck in my head. It happened like that sometimes. A tune would get stuck in my head and it would circle around and around like a goldfish in a bowl, covering the same 12 inches of water again and again and again. And sometimes I would sing. Loud, top of my lungs kind of singing. The kind of singing you do when you are sure that no one is listening. The kind of singing my husband likes to call my “Cher” imitation.
So on this particular day, with one of those little jingles stuck in my head, I went skipping down the steps to the basement to collect the pan that would soon hold my birthday cake, singing, at the very top of my lungs, “my seamless, isn’t shapeless, anymo..…”
Surprise!
And there I was, in mid-jingle. Before the ‘more’ could come all the way out of my mouth, I was greeted by a basement full of my nearest and dearest friends who had been clandestinely gathered in my basement by my very best friend in a conspiracy with my Mom to celebrate this important transition in my life. And at that moment, at that very moment of transition, I was singing a bra commercial. It was a moment I would never forget. I could not know what was coming, the twists and turns and ups and downs of the path that lay in front of me. I was young and innocent and standing at the threshold of a journey I had only just begun. And so, with eyes wide open, I began to walk, straight into my life.
That’s the thing about walking. You tend to look straight ahead, eyes on the horizon, walking towards whatever it is you are headed to. You might look to the side occasionally, taking inventory of where you are and what surrounds you, but the horizon is never far from view. You stroll down cool mossy paths, wander through bright sunny meadows, pausing a moment to dip your toe into the icy cold creek.
And sometimes you climb. Straight uphill, with determination and commitment and focus, always keeping your eyes forward, looking towards the horizon. Your breath is heavy and your feet hurt sometimes, but you keep going, determined to make it to the top.
And you keep walking.
Until one day without planning, you stop, deciding to pause for a bit and finding yourself a place to set for a spell. Knowing where you have yet to go, you take the opportunity to look back at where you’ve been.
And you know what? You know what you see if you turn around and look back? Not a quick, cursory glance but a full 180 degree turn, your back to the horizon, your eyes trained down the path that you have just worked so hard to walk? You know what you see?
You see places you’ve been and things you’ve accomplished. Dreams realized and dreams forgotten. You see tender meadows and challenging hills and mossy paths of sadness and exhilarating streams and magnificent wildflowers that you might have missed the first time around, things that only crossed your peripheral vision, never fully coming into consciousness. Those things. Only now you can see them because you’ve stopped for a moment to look. Really look at where you’ve been.
Stepping back is like that.
And you see faces. Many, many faces. The faces of the people who have walked with you along the way. Your childhood best friend. Your piano teacher. The Camp Counselor that made those two weeks every summer more special than she would ever know. Your prissy college roommate, who you never liked and your grumpy boss at Duke Island Park. Yep. They are there too. And your family who has been there forever, walking, sometimes silently sometimes not so, by your side. That’s what you see when you take the time too look back.
You don’t stop looking forward. You don’t lose sight of the horizon. It’s just that one day, you realize that where you’ve come from turns out to be just as important as where you are going.
And on that day when you pause to sit, when you pull up a rock and gaze back at the path you have travelled, with a little luck, you’ll be singing. Because, as it turns out, that wasn’t the only surprise party after all.