I saw the most beautiful interview with Leonard Cohen on YouTube and it got me thinking about some things. Cohen talked about how he was in the third act of his life, if one looked at life as a three act play in which you are the protagonist. Being a student of, among other things, narrative, and how people take on narrative to make sense of the world, the three act narrative suddenly struck me as an explanation for my life in the last year--a narrative that I can tell myself to understand where I am in life.
If my life is a three act play in which I am the protagonist, I have just finished the first act: the curtain coming when Yoko and Naomi and I stood on the deck of that boat leaving Niigata. The second act, I feel, is just beginning, that this year will likely fall between the acts.
The second act of life, I think, is committed to two things, raising a family and building a career/ life work.
For some reason, thinking of things in this way brings me a lot of peace. Not that things are played out, but that there is a time to do some things and a time to do others.