Life in All Its Awesomeness

Post Author: Sarah Moore

Last week, at a continuing-education event with my peers, I was invited to draw or write my life map. The facilitator held up hers as an example, talking the group through it. She spoke of being born in a particular year, a bit about her childhood, her university days, and then went on to marriage and motherhood punctuated with high points of professional achievement.

Now writing or drawing a life map is far from uncharted territory for me. This was at least the fourth or fifth time I had done this exercise, so I might quip that I have an exceptionally well-mapped life.

The thing is, though, that my life map doesn’t fit the cookie cutter pattern of birth-childhood-school-university-job-relationship(s)-commitment/marriage-children (and still doing well at work, thank you very much). You see, at the age of 37, I still haven’t got around to the relationship-marriage-children bit of the curve, and I’m far from convinced that my future will be so conventional.

So I grabbed a large sheet of bright green craft paper and a plastic cup of sharpies in a rainbow of colours and wondered how to approach the task this time around. One thing I knew for sure was that I’d written enough linear maps of my life that began with birth, included 2.4 university degrees and an ordination service, and ended with moving to wherever I had been located at that time. That seemed too conventional, and a bit dull, and didn’t take enough account of the overall awesomeness of my life.

I have been single for pretty much my entire adult life. It wasn’t any different for me as a teenager of dateable age either. I was always too busy living life to the full. Too busy doing homework, or volunteering, or working at my part time job. Too busy wondering what life would hold. In all honesty, I probably assumed that a partner would come along and I’d have the 2.4 children to match my 2.4 university degrees, but that was never a story that I consciously or positively wanted for myself. I sometimes struggle to understand those who describe their experience of yearning to meet and have a partner, or the all-consuming longing for a child that is the lot of others.

I realised as I doodled on my large sheet of green paper that I have never understood my life as a journey between fixed points. I reflected instead on the wealth of ideas and activities that nourish me—mind, body and soul—as I gradually fill out the detail of my map with every week, month and year that passes. It struck me, and not for the first time, that it is actually pretty awesome being single. It isn’t cheap—the costs of running a home are not cut in half just because there is one person instead of two—and sometimes it is a lot of work. There’s no slack in the system when work is busy, or I’m ill. Unless my parents happen to be visiting, I can’t get someone else to shop, or cook, or deal with the overflowing laundry basket.

Last year I attended a lecture given by well known British cartographer and journalist Nicholas Crane. Crane has written a number of books about maps and mapmakers as well as embarking on a number of mind-bogglingly astonishing journeys on foot or by bicycle. Crane spoke about the judgments that cartographers have to make about what goes onto a map at all. Without having an exact life-size map of the area in question it is impossible to include every detail. Decisions need to be made about what is included on a map and what is left out. Some maps will include humanmade landmarks: churches, schools, hospitals, town halls, sports fields and the like. Others might include contour lines, rivers, cliffs, hills, marsh or other representation of the physical landscape. Crane described what gets left off of a map as a ‘map silence’ and that what is omitted from a map, intentionally or otherwise, is as interesting as what is included.

It struck me that my map silences and map features are almost the complete opposite of those likely to be chosen by many people. The features of my map include the lake of my fascination with all that is novel and challenging and the castle of my love of cooking. I have a cathedral of my wanderlust, feeling most alive when I’m on a mountain top or immersed in an unfamiliar culture. I play in rivers of new ideas that stretch my mind and my soul. Being single and childfree enables me to focus on living life in the present–neither nostalgic for what is past or so trapped in a whirlwind of future ambition such that I miss what is right before me in the here and now. That isn’t to say that I don’t yearn for a better world–I relish the dawn of Advent each year when the Church celebrates God’s promise that ultimately everything will be transformed and made new.

As I pondered the features and silences of my map it struck me that for me, I’m not sure that life could be any better. I genuinely believe that I have life in all its fullness in the here and now as a single person. I certainly don’t believe that my life would be automatically better if I had a partner. The demands of my current ministry would be harder to respond to if I had small children. I know it isn’t the case for everyone, but for me, being single is an enormously positive feature that enables me to live out my life in all its fullness, the abundant life that Christ promised to those who believe in him in John 10.

When I look back over the last decade of my life I have done and achieved some amazing things that I could not have done had my life circumstances been different. Those experiences have made me who I am, and those experiences were awesome. I do not define myself by who or what I am not. True, I am no one’s partner, wife or mother, but neither do I currently wish to be. I define myself as a baptised person. I happen to be ordained, but that too is a label on my map that does not need to be written in bold or big letters. I define myself as one who chooses to live outside of the box, refusing to colour inside the lines of society’s or anyone else’s outline. I define myself as one who is kind, welcoming and open to the new things that I discover as my map stretches into the undiscovered country of my future. Can partnered people who are parents live this way? Of course they can; I’m just not sure that I could in their shoes! Being single means that I have life in all its fullness; or to put another way, in all its awesomeness.