What is a Chasm Bridge? (or welcome to the abyss)

One of my dad’s favorite sayings is that “in life there is what is and what ought to be, and they are not the same thing.” He said this my entire childhood and now as an adult I still hear him saying it. I have come to believe that wisdom is found in understanding how to bridge the chasm between these two, between reality and the ideal.

I am now a divorced, single mother, although that is not how I define myself. We are all multi faceted and varied, not as easily defined as the world wants to see us. There are moments when I am still that 24 year old recent college graduate who just moved to San Francisco with my entire life in front of me, staying out late with friends to watch the sun rise over the bay, going to shows to hear our favorite bands, or sneaking on the roof our apartment with the crazy lady on the top floor who would come out and yell at us for being up there; and other times I’m a frantic single mother with too much to do and not enough time, loosing patience with my son as he follows the dandelion seeds through their wind guided travels and my stress jumps over the fence with him.

Regardless of these robes, these masks, these outer shells, I, like so many others out there, find myself exploring the world of this chasm between reality and the ideal. I ask myself, how do I help my son understand it and create his own bridge, his own reality, his own peace and happiness? There will be a day, all too soon, when he’ll be old enough to connect his own understandings of “what is” and “what aught to be” and I hope I’ve done my job to give him the tools to navigate this world of joy and disappointment, abundance and sadness, peace and strife.

Getting divorced was a giant leap into this chasm, for both of us (that’s my son and me, my ex and I get along just great, but he has his own realities to work out). Now, my life lives here down deep in the abyss, but there are others here and it’s kind of pretty. My hope is to create a community of friends down here in our pastoral valley of our own making. Perhaps we’ll build some bridges, perhaps we’ll just hang out here and throw a party.