Irony

Ludlow lay under the comforter looking at the scrapbooks of his life, his mind enlivened by a mild fever. He had reached the age where his habitually romantic frame of mind had turned to the ironies...
-Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison

Ah, the ironies. The life you planned on living, the things you dreamed would happen, the times you just knew you'd have. And things turned out differently. The poet David Whyte considers these Ludlow-moments as quite possibly the beginning of our true lives. Up until that moment or time, we're going through life with essentially a naive, childish approach to living. And then things begin to get ironic, twisted somewhat, out of sorts...and they continue on that way. It's at that point, according to Whyte, that we are presented with the opportunity to move into an adult-adult relationship with life. We lose our sense of immunity to the things that all humanity has and will face in existence. We're initiated into the circle of humanity and we can accept the ironies or retreat back into some regretful, childish place of if only.

How would you complete that phrase - if only ? The reality is that whatever the only was didn't happen; something else did. Those biblical sisters, Mary and Martha, experienced that irony when their brother died. They sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was sick unto death and Jesus took his divinely-sweet time getting there. And by that time, their brother had died. The sisters greet the Lord with if only you'd come sooner, Lord. Little did they know that they were on the verge of the beauty of irony. They were about to say, When I was a girl, I believed like a girl, but when Lazarus died and Jesus didn't come and then Lazaurs was alive and Jesus stopped weeping; then I became a woman.