A different kind of healing

 Sometimes I wonder just what it is that I'm supposed to be doing with this part of my life (retirement). Not having a job to go to was a huge adjustment for me -- especially because it came about rather unexpectedly, and a few years sooner than I had planned. I've never done well with unstructured time. And suddenly I had nothing but hours and days and years of ... what felt like nothingness ... stretching out ahead of me. Our original retirement plan of buying my parents' house and moving to Michigan fell through almost immediately after I retired. After that, I fell into a deep depression. 

  I had a vague plan of writing some books. In fact, I had already started on the first one. But it's hard to write when you're depressed. (Especially when the book you're writing is about your lifelong struggles with depression!) I had spent years buying books to read during my retirement, and coloring books for something mindless and fun to do. But still, the urge to do something more meaningful was hounding me. I believe we come into this life with certain tasks to fulfill, and lessons to learn. The frustrating part is that we don't remember exactly what those tasks and lessons are, so we have to figure it out blindly as we go along. And if we don't learn what we're supposed to learn, and do what we're supposed to do, we end up having to come back and try it again. And again. And again. Until we get it right. (Don't tell my fundamentalist Christian friends that I subscribe to the reincarnation heresy, okay?) The lesson, of course, is love. It's always love, in one form or another. A psychic told me that I am a 'healer'. Well, I don't know if I'm supposed to be the kind of healer she had in mind or not. I did have a long career in healthcare, as a nurse, and later in medical records analysis, cancer research, and patient safety. But what kind of healer am I supposed to be now? I thought about taking a Reiki class or something like that. But I didn't follow through with it. 

  And then... I inherited a truckload -- no, literally a TRUCK LOAD (okay, an SUV loaded floor to ceiling) -- of family photos and family history research information that both of my parents had accumulated over the years. Well, that was IT. That was the magic potion that saved my life. Since becoming the curator of the family history, I no longer search for a reason to get out of bed every morning. Now I have a great big toybox full of things to do every day. The people in the photos and stories are as real to me as anyone I've ever known in real life. (Well, a lot of them I did know in real life.) 

  Now, after almost four years of playing with my toys, I have put together twenty-some-odd photo albums and self-published four books full of family photos and stories. They are too precious to keep to myself, I felt I had to share them, not knowing whether anyone else would treasure them as much as I do or not. I didn't do it for money -- although I have become a hundredaire from selling my books. I did it for the sheer pleasure of doing it. But now it seems that maybe there has been a certain amount of 'healing' attached to that pleasure, as well. Not just the healing of my own life, but also maybe some beneficial influence in some other folks' lives, too.

  So maybe, just maybe, while I'm searching for what it is that I'm supposed to be doing with my retirement years, I've just discovered that... I'm already doing it!