Boardwalk or Baltic Avenue?

As I knew it must but hoped it wouldn't, the other shoe has dropped. It had to eventually – shoes come on and off with regularity. What did I expect? Like the odd weather lately in my typically wet city, with unremitting blue skies and no rain for months, the pattern changed a week ago: to all-day gray with still no precipitation, and clouds low enough to touch.

My mood is right there with the skies.

I suppose this is nature's way of saying, "Don't get used to anything!" And I, coming off a spectacular run of positive brain chemistry and events, have settled down into what feels like a winter funk. I noticed immediately the earlier sunsets once August was underway. Almost overnight the skies darkened an hour earlier. I notice this every August, and besides the change in the angle, intensity and length of light, it signals other adjustments. Evening bike rides must end sooner. Long strolls during the magic hour – the time photographers love called dusk – are limited to a fast-shrinking window of opportunity. Like every other cycle in the Universe, this is the beginning of a contraction, the opposite of Spring's expansion. A Rumi poem addresses this beautifully:

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you'd be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.

I must also remember that, as with an earthquake, I have no idea how long this perimenopause will last. There's no way to tell just where I am in the process of The Change, and how much the hormonal upheaval intensifies a lifelong pattern of blues. The spring and summer have been a gift, granting me several months of "up" – not mania, but contentment and joy that were present when I awoke and with me throughout the day. I made some major personal breakthroughs during this period, found a wonderful job, began to lose a few pounds. I thought I was finally "on my way."

And I suppose I still am. Perhaps this isn't a setback so much as a reminder of cycles. This one comes with baggage I 'm not used to: the frustration of being unable to read anything without increasingly strong glasses, a persistent brain fog that robs me of focus and concentration, a low-level fatigue that propels me to the bed for far too many hours on far too many days. Dizziness and headaches occur with increasing frequency. Not to mention dryness everywhere, in my eyes, my skin, my sex. The estrogen balance is askew, and will remain so. Though I have not had more than one or two mild hot flashes (knock on wood), I am probably at the difficult point of deciding whether to begin hormone replacement therapy. Every cell in my being says not to do it. But there are risks in that decision as well.

And so comes the other component of this stage of life: the knowledge that no matter what you do, you're falling apart. It's a recognition of mortality, made more difficult by multitudinous and conflicting opinions about how to stay healthy. It's as if nobody knows anything but generalizations, and yet we're all so different that those generalizations can be nearly useless.

(As a sidebar, the "medicalization" of society is a huge topic, surely a symptom of a deeper malaise. An inordinate amount of money and energy is spent on perfecting individual fitness and health. While health is not something to take for granted, hardly any of us put similar energy into addressing the other things that ail us, individually or culturally: lack of community, overwork, environmental health, poverty, etc.)

As I said in my earlier post, it feels like a return to adolescence, replete with confusion and growing pains of a different sort. It's amazing how you can be so clear, focused and purposeful one minute, and then feel like you've drawn the Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200 card the next. Like the fortunes won and lost in Monopoly, though, it helps to remember something about this transitory and mysterious life, from a Buddhist perspective at least: no matter how much or little you have, it's all play money in the end.