Untethered

 

Untethered! She said, "You look untethered." Wow, I immediately thought, does it show? I've been trying the last nine months, now ten, to be released, untied, unfettered, free of all of the expectations, obligations, responsibilities, duties, restrictions, roles, rules, tensions, and criticisms that have been the daily ritual of my professional life for nearly forty years. I even have found it challenging to separate my authentic, spiritual life from all of the aspects I had to "put on" by my professional role. I always have had that struggle, but the delineation became more stark since I retired.

 

So for her, this complete stranger, to say just three words which so quickly caught my attention and so fully confirmed my journey into retirement was exhilarating. I had never used that word to describe my quest for the future either prior to my retirement or since. I certainly had not expected this journey into the next phase of my life to take nine months, nor to be completed in an Episcopalian church on Easter morning, with the gift of communion and the sermonic refrain of grace.  And so on an evening of art at my granddaughter's school, an unknown young female sculptor announces to me what seems obvious to her and has birthed in me these last nine months with the word "untethered."

Ah, my being untethered was exactly what I have been seeking: to be honestly, nakedly, who I am, to shed all that with which I have been burdened, even imprisoned. So more than a month after the Easter Eucharist was the confirmation that I had turned another direction and that I was free from regret and resentment. And I am delighted that these two pronouncements, occurring in a makeshift art gallery and a traditional liturgy with its so very familiar rehearsal of grace, combine to propel me into the future...