The Messy Middles.

It’s a phrase a couple of sweet friends and I use in our daily/weekly/whenever text thread we have going on.

It’s an idea.  A feeling.  A verbal picture of where we think we find ourselves right now.

Or always.

The Messy Middle.

The life we lived before this very day, this very instant, is all pretty clearly defined.

The Past.

It already happened.

All the cliches are accurate – You can’t go back.  There’s no fixing the past.  What’s done is done.  Yesterday is yesterday.  And so on ….

So there you have it.  (Actually, I take issue with the concept that “you can’t fix the past”.  I think you can – sort of.  But that’s another topic for another day.)

The Past.

Parts of the past are fuzzy.  Covered in a film of youth and nostalgia and dream sequences and how we like to remember it best.

Parts of the past are painfully crystal clear.  Sterile hospital rooms.  Life altering phone calls.  Frozen in time conversations.

Parts of the past are just regular and kind of forgettable.  Monotonous.  The commute to work.  The daily lunch packing.  The steady laundry chores.

The life we have yet to live is one gigantic question mark, despite our best efforts to clear the path and tidy the way and make ourselves comfortable in the next phases of our lives.

The Future.

And of that future we actually have NO idea.  But we spend a-plenty of time predicting it and hoping for it and dreading it and walking around in fear about it.  All paths with which I am intimately familiar.

But we don’t get to know it.  We can’t own it.  We’ve got no claim to it.

The beginning of the book, we’ve written, so to speak.  The ending of the book we are trying to mash out with pen and paper.

But this middle part?

We are stuck.

The Messy Middle.

We.  Cannot.  Figure it out.

It makes so little sense – how this middle part fits with the intro we’ve been given and the ending we assume.

Like we’re reading chapters from several books at once without a connection at all.  Where is the thread that ties them neatly together in a bow at the end?

Of course, that’s just it.

The view from this Messy Middle is dangerously short-sighted.  It’s complicated and it’s frustrating and the plot line is totally wonky.

Who’s writing this mess anyway?

And we are just these characters here, wading through the mire and the muck, with no clue how the other side looks.  Or where the other side is.  Up or down or that left turn we missed two miles ago?

The people of the Messy Middle have no clue.

And – you know – I am a person swallowed up whole in the Messy Middle.

Maybe you are too.

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Side Note:  I came back to this blog post multiple times before posting it.  Thinking I’d rewrite the ending.  Spiritualize it.  Remind me and you both of the hope for all of our messy middles.  I felt like this post didn’t end well.   Didn’t turn the corner and point in the right direction.

But then, I realized . . .

Sometimes when you are in the middle of the mess, it’s alright just to acknowledge you’re sitting there.  I don’t have to wrap it up tidy because I can’t do that anyway.

Instead, I’m leaving it all just hanging here – suspended in mid-air.

All Messy Middle-like.

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