the arc of a lifetime…
Although memory is a slippery beast, the layout of the L.A. library is perma-etched in my mind. The library was my holy shrine to wonder and enchantment, essential as milk for the task of growing up. I totally remember the day I ventured across the huge gulf separating the children’s section from the adult reading department. I landed in biographies at the age of ten and my appetite was insatiable; I consumed one profile after another. There was some kind of healing magic held in these life stories.
Maybe it was the validation, the vision, the concreteness of witnessing a life fully sketched out. The dosage of hope inherent in random circumstance and hardship and just plain bad luck balanced and transformed by grit and determination and changes in the winds of fortune. Ever since childhood my fascination with the arc of a lifetime has never waned. I am forever drawn to books and films that let me in on the personal stories of how decades unspool from beginning to end.
So what happened the other day is no surprise. I often walk along M Street for an hour of movement and sometimes I am gifted with teaching inspiration. I call these revelations “downloads from the universe” and recently I was seeking download when I spied a trash pile in the street. Sitting atop was a large broken clock:
I immediately mused “What are you doing with the time you have left?” And that morphed right into the Sunday Sweat theme. The answer to this question seamlessly formed into a 5Rhythms wave; the playlist just magically assembled itself. I love when that happens.
But something much deeper than this single class began to stir in me. The clock, nailed to my backyard fence, continues to whisper. The circular nature of time feels so akin to my fascination in lifetime arcs. Maybe 12:00 is birth and death. The quarter span to 3:00, all the years until 18 when I lived at home. The stretch to 6:00, the maturity of adulting that delivered me to 50, the year of my vision quest. And the bridge to 9:00 carried me through all the changes on my way to 70, when the onset of Covid coincided with my father’s death. Now I am walking my way home in the quadrant ending at 12:00. And the perspective in this moment is amazing.
I don’t know what the future holds. None of us do. But I do know this: I am called to write about my own lifetime arc, the stories held in these four quadrants. Here we are, poised on the brink of the last quadrant of 2025. What a great time to embark on this call to auto-biograph, this moment poised between two workshops designed to flesh out this very territory.
On September 10-14 you’ll find us dancing the embodied entire life review covered in the oh-so-juicy workshop Cycles. I hope you can join us. Click on the card for info.
And at the very 12:00 end of 2025, I’ll hold space for us to dance/art/write into our very own clock quadrants in the workshop Destiny December 31/ January 1. I hope you can join us here, too. Click on the card for info.
I have no idea how this might pan out, but there is no place like 12:00 birth to begin. Look to future newsletters for unfolding chapters. Because I can so clearly see my arc. And so much of the story makes sense to me in retrospect, pieces that made no sense at all in current time.
I’ll see some of you this Friday at Release & Realign. Our next dance is Wednesday Waves on September 3. In the meantime, this invitation to reflect: where are you on that clock? What is it you really want to do with the precious time you have left?
❤️Bella