As I sat on my balcony with a big cup of coffee in one of my oldest and most favorite mugs, on one of Nashville’s most perfect mornings, I looked out over the downtown and the amphitheater. The mug was from my single mom days, and it is an actual miracle that it has survived this long. I remember when I first bought it, and the second I saw it in the department store it made me smile. It exuded happiness in my usually gray world. I sat on my balcony and thought about that mug and that time in my life, which forced me to remember this weekend when Dave Matthews was playing at the amphitheater right off my balcony. I have been listening to Dave Matthews for as long as I’ve had that mug and when he started playing one of my favorite songs “The Space Between” it brought me right back in time.
When I heard Dave Matthews sing “The Space Between” for the first time it had an entirely different meaning than it did Saturday night. The first time I listened to that song I took it in its more literal meaning. For me, it was about a boy and a love that should never have happened but did. A love that would never grow into what I had wished it would. Fast forward fifteen years later, and I am sitting on my balcony with a boy who took me out of the shadows and breathed life into my soul. So that chilly Saturday night, me and my boy snuggled under blankets listening to Dave sing The Space Between and my mind was forced to hear that song differently. It has become more a song about me as a person than a love I wish I had.
If you know me, you know that I struggle with finding my purpose in life. I am always chasing “what is next,” “now what.” I have a large problem with waking up and having no plan for the day. That struggle is less when I am working, but my new life brings work in spurts. When I am working, I am running a million miles an hour. Usually, seven days a week, often 10 to 12 hours a day, but when the show or project is over, and I am home, it is as if I have slammed into a brick wall. I am usually exhausted, craving my chicken’s faces, my own bed and coffee in my favorite mug on my balcony. Once I have peeled myself off that brick wall, drank all the coffee, slept longer than sleeping beauty and hugged my chickens until they let out a yelp “mom, my ribs” I find myself in the space between and I am as lost in that space as I was 15 years ago.
I don’t like that space between, I feel so restless when I am sitting in that space, and as a person who hates change more than she hates peas, it has me craving change. I think that if I change something that restlessness will go away and something will fill that space between, anything. Currently, I have no new job on the horizon, no project in the works, no real plans for the future. Life is an entirely blank canvas, and I can do just about anything I want to do, anything to fill in that space, and it is so frustrating to me. Don’t get me wrong; I am grateful for all I have in my life, a great apartment, great kids, great husband. I am well aware of how far I have come, and I know that not everyone is “lucky” enough to sit on a balcony full of flowers looking at the downtown of America’s newest “IT” city with a cup of coffee and contemplate life.
Right now I don’t have any answers on how to fill that space between and the best I can do right now is fill that mug up with more coffee, sit on my balcony and hope the warm Nashville breeze will blow something into that space and fill it.
