Milestones

Pink Evening, No Filter - Sept 2021

In the days of the Roman Empire, milestones were placed along roadways as markers of distance, and sometimes as signposts of sorts. In current times, the term milestone refers to life events and goals achieved.

My daughter Charlotte is graduating from high school this weekend, and milestones as both life events and accomplishments have been on my mind. Although completing high school is a somewhat unremarkable step in the scheme of things, it is truly the culmination of a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and brain-demand, and I think for a lot of people, getting through high school can feel deserving of a finish line t-shirt: I SURVIVED.

Celebrations such as graduation feel important because they are the life happenings by which we mark the passage of time. There is a depth of connection between family and friends unique to significant events like birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries and funerals. Even with family in-fighting or friends who don’t always see eye-to-eye, celebrating these milestones together creates a bond of shared experience. 

With personal challenges or goals such as climbing a mountain, surviving cancer, finishing a race, recovering from a serious car accident, sometimes the milestone marking is an inside job, or shared with a more intimate few. When I ran through the finish chute at my first marathon in Los Angeles, I walked away from the finish line party vibe to find a quiet spot in the grass. I was on my own, and I was happy to relish my accomplishment in relative peace and solitude.

When I think of milestones as road markers, I imagine a smooth gray ribbon of asphalt dotted with uniformly sized and evenly spaced boulders, disappearing into the horizon. It’s a frighteningly dull view of life: birth, school, graduation, career, marriage, children, grandchildren, death. 

But real life is so much more than that. It is a wide dirt road morphing into a dusty footpath, then a slick superhighway into a barely-there double-track with puddles and grassy clumps. The way meanders - through meadow and forest, maybe through the county dump or a toxic waste site. The stones can be small, the size of a fist, or huge - a mammoth chunk of rock tossed to the side when the glacier rolled through. The path doesn’t always go straight or end up at the intended destination. It doubles back, or heads off down a hidden slot canyon. Years might be spent at certain stones, their size not indicative of the length of time spent there.  

Our milestones might be smooth, mottled with colorful lichen, rough, sharp, rounded. We may have hundreds, or twenty - that doesn’t necessarily matter. What does matter is that the milestones in our lives are meaningful, deeply so, because they are our milestones. Our achievements, our scars, our hard-won life stories. 

Charlotte is in the midst of her milestone-making. I am grateful to watch as she creates them. And though I have a few more miles on the path, I too am still in the midst of milestone-making. I am grateful for that too.

Rainy Day Lichen near Fish Creek - Sept 2021