Tag: society

Some thoughts on gratitude

Grateful seems such a trite simplification of what it is that I feel these days. Upon searching for synonyms for the word, thankful, beholden, pleased, and indebted came across. Still, none of these feels like the right word… Appreciative, contented, happy, satisfied, charmed… that’s getting closer.

Regardless of the triviality of the words by which we are limited, I am indeed, overcome with deep gratitude for where things are in my life. Is daily life on this rock difficult? Sure thing. Do I get worn down by the daily grind? You betcha. Do I feel a constant stirring in my gut telling me that I’m on the right path, albeit restlessly? Absofuckinglutely. There is not a fiber of my being that is telling me I should be elsewhere, for maybe the first time in my life. I am currently creating the life I’ve always dreamed of, not necessarily where I thought I would, and certainly not with whom I ever thought possible. But that’s the fun of creating something you’ve never created before. The surprises. 

I am not one to be surprised by much, simply because I have seen and done many things that are stranger than fiction. However, once in a while, I am awestruck by the strangeness that my life has become. I have been driving to work in my car, and thought to myself, “How. The Hell. Did. I. Get. Here.” I say this to my partner several times a week, it seems. How did we get here? With all the twists and turns and shake-ups… we ended up here, in this space together. It’s very bizarre. But I am grateful. 

I’m overcome with gratitude when I pick up my daughter from my sister’s house every day after work. She comes running out the door, yelling “Mommy! Mommy! You’re back!” and I tell her, “Yes, baby. I will always come back for you.” Pure bliss is on her face, so excited to see me after a long day of playing with cousins she’s just recently met, and a loving family that have been too far away until we moved across the country for better opportunities. 

I am showered in gratitude, like waves in the ocean, the feeling of love and connectedness washes over me in these simple moments. Holding my kiddo, waking up with my partner, relaxing on the couch with the dogs and cats. All of these simple joys are what my soul has needed recently, after the months of anxiety and stress, the challenges I’ve recently had to face. After losing almost everything, I can only live in a place of love and gratitude. There’s no other place to inhabit. I have been blessed with exactly the life that I’m meant to have.

And by no means is this post meant to be braggadocious. Quite the opposite, actually. I firmly believe that if I am deserving of everything my heart has truly desired, a simple, beautiful life… it can be had be anyone. We ALL DESERVE to have a simple life, full of love, devotion, gratitude and grace. We just have to let it in, and let the bullshit wash off. Happiness is a choice. The Universe WANTS that for us. We just have to choose it. I choose happy every single day. You can too.

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Long Division

How does one separate something that has taken years to build? It could have taken 2 years, or 20, but each day you added bricks and build a foundation, walls, windows… it develops into a fortress to protect you from the world. This fortress is supposed to be impenetrable. It shields all the inhabitants inside. So how, and where, does one even start to take it down? Do you burn the drawbridge? Trebuchet the shit out of the exterior? It’s hard to know, I guess. Circumstances often dictate the destruction of your fort.

But what do you do if you’re not mad, but have simply decided that this fort is shit, and you don’t want to live there anymore? Do you attempt to keep the status quo until arrangements change? Do you still burn the drawbridge and trebuchet the exterior? What about a volatile situation? What then? When inside the fortress is nothing but pure chaos, and there’s fires everywhere? How does one process getting everyone to safety? What does safety even look like, when you’re bed is in flames? Are there really any survivors? Nobody escapes totally unscathed, right?

long_division_8

And there’s the long division. Strangely enough, if you never unpack, it’s easier to move. But now, we must sift through every. single. thing. to determine what belongs to whom, or who gets it in the dividing process. Then, there’s the others in the fortress… what becomes of them? The friends? You know everyone chooses sides, whether or not they consciously chose a side. Even family chooses sides, despite best efforts. It’s like we drew a line, and everyone decides which side they’ll forever stand on.

What I’ve determined is the worst of all, is the feeling of sudden emptiness. Loneliness. You once had a sounding board to share in your trials and triumphs with. Now, there’s friends or family, but it’s not the same. I want to share my joys and sorrows with someone who is in the fortress WITH me. We are fighting on the same side, in the same battles. People outside the fort, they just can’t appreciate the inner workings of your brain and heart, without first having to explain yourself. That is fucking exhausting. Constantly going over the same stuff, all the time. I just want to have my heart safely in the hands of someone I don’t have to “preface” with. New is positively exciting. Electric. But old, it’s comforting, familiar. That’s not to say I want a damn thing to do with this decaying rubble, but there’s something to be said for the familiar.

My heart aches for what it doesn’t have. My mind longs for a simple life. My intuition knows that this has expired and that it’s no longer home for me. Now what do I do with myself?

 

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Landlocked

There’s a song by Death Cab for Cutie titled Brothers on a Hotel Bed, with a line “even landlocked lovers yearn for the sea like navy men”. As someone who has been living in landlocked states for the majority of my life, I understand this with great clarity.

Listen to it here

There’s some scientific evidence about the health benefits of living near the coast (Article) that are wide ranging and in many ways, primal. I’ve heard benefits include negative ions in the air is similar to being surrounded 24/7 by a salt lamp, improving mood, sleep patterns, and more. During the brief time I lived in Southern California, I was still about an hour (without traffic) from the ocean. I highly doubt the benefits stretched quite that far, but I was close enough to eek out some of it, I’m sure.

Back to the Death Cab lyrics.

It’s partly about growing older, but I feel as though it’s also a relationship that’s reaching its end as well. “You may tire of me, as our December sun is setting, because I’m not who I used to be.”

I know so much about this. It’s hard not to change, and one of the great tragedies of life is that you’re not guaranteed to grow in the same direction, at the same pace, or even remotely in the same fashion as your romantic partners, friends, or family. It’s hard to have a lasting connection with someone who has grown to live on another planet.

But it’s with any relationship with another fallible human, you run the risk of being on different planes. It’s hard to find people who share the same wavelength, let alone for any amount of time. “Because now we say goodnight, from our own separate sides, like brothers on a hotel bed”

Sleeping in a bed with someone with whom you don’t connect, is weird and hard. I had a partner years ago, that didn’t like to be touched at night. I wasn’t able to rest my head or hands on him, let alone embrace. It was like there was a vast divide between us, lacking intimacy completely. I wasn’t allowed to even sleep close enough to feel his body heat. Previous to him, my first husband, near the end of our relationship we slept like burritos on opposite edges of a king size bed, in our own separate blankets. You easily could have snuck another full person and none of us would have touched.

It’s been like that more recently too, progressively getting further away. We slept in separate beds after a while, partly because we had a small child in ours with me who was still nursing, and partly because of good old fashioned stubbornness from us both. I had, for a long time, been wedged between him and her, scarcely occupying space at all. Just enough to slide in and out at bedtime or waking. But that’s what I’ve been conditioned to do.

Scarcely occupy space.

Not just in my romantic partnerships, but even as a child. I was watched by my grandfather, and he was old school. Rigid. Children are to be quiet, keep themselves busy without making a mess, or noise, or anything. We weren’t allowed outside, unless we were all outside. He couldn’t watch us, if he couldn’t see us. So for many many many hours growing up, I sat silent, not touching anything or anyone. That probably explains why I’m so outgoing now, and a hugger. Man, am I a hugger. My kid loves it (for now), but many adults think it’s weird, especially those in which I’m not particularly close or familiar.

I think physical connection makes people uncomfortable these days, in general. We are so accustomed to being totally isolated from physical contact, save for the strangely obligatory handshake. We often live in cubicles, our cars, small parts of large houses. Scarcely occupying space.

For me, this notion that we need to be isolated is totally nuts. I think it’s by and large a good chunk of why we are so miserable as a society. We simply aren’t wired to be separate. Granted, I dislike greatly strangers I do not invite to, touching me, I’ll shake hands with virtually anyone, and dish out shittons of hugs.

It just makes me truly sad that when we are disconnecting with someone, that one of the first, quiet signs, is that the gap between your physical space widens. I understand that you can’t spoon every night for decades, but we can be near, can’t we? I read somewhere that when relationships are near implosion, sex is still something that regularly happens, because as I’ve heard, needs. But KISSING stops long before the sex. It’s that intimate, face to face contact that falls away. “Like brothers on a hotel bed.”

Thanks for reading.

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Love is a choice

Life, like love, is messy and complicated, difficult and flat out hard. We want it to be fun and exciting, but things bog us down, make us heavy. The trick to love, is to fight through that hard and find the things that are beautiful.

There have been times where I’m at my heaviest, and I see something so simple, a glimmer in time, and it makes me feel weightless for just a moment. It’s the breadcrumb that keeps me going. The trail leading me to the next bend in the pathway.

My life has been particularly heavy as of late, and it’s got no chance of lifting in the near future. I’ve been seething with anger at people who could have chosen love. I’ve been shattered by words and deeds, crushed by apathy and indifference. Everything has been flipped upside down.

However, just like love, hate is a choice. I can choose to be angry, sad, and destructive toward myself and others. But what good would come of it? My child would see a mother who is consumed by loathing and frustration. A mother set on destruction- destroying the ones who hurt her, and all the bonds for both sides.

I choose love. Through the fear and anger, the betrayal and malice. I choose love. Letting the anger consume me isn’t doing anyone any favors, especially my kid. I need to be a whole person, one who models the life I want to teach. I need to find the grace in what is otherwise a heartbreaking situation. For me, for my daughter.

Am I still hurt? Sure. Pissed off? Yup. But am I going to waste another moment of my life hating someone? Nobody got time for for that.

Ironically, the year of forced growth has put some important things into perspective for me. The last several years have been a bizarre re-enactment of a previous chapter in my life, but instead of playing the “me” role, I’m the other person. I see now, with glaring clarity what I did to completely derail and sabotage my own life back then. It’s taken much longer than I’d like to admit for me to come to that conclusion, but I got here.

Not only do I now recognize my shortcomings in great detail, but I perfectly understand how they felt during that time. I’ve been beating myself up for more than a decade, because I didn’t completely understand both sides of the equation. But here we are. Lesson learned. Because life is messy and complicated, it couldn’t be quite so easy to extricate from as the first time, since, it took me so fucking long to learn it. However, I’m here now in the right place. It feels terrible in every way. Lesson learned. And through it all, I choose love. It’s all I’ve got left.

Thanks for reading.

Photo credit: wordporn

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Forced Growth

Recently I was reading about what’s in store for 2019, according to astrologers. Apparently, it’s not going to be “my year”, but rather a year of forced growth. When I read this, I laughed.

For many years I’ve said that the Universe, when you’re too thick skulled to learn certain lessons, despite repeated “opportunities” to learn, will in fact force your hand. The Universe is funny like that. You only get so many tries before it’s like, “ok, dummy, we are doing this my way”. I’m notoriously thick skulled sometimes.

I want to think the best of people. I want to think we are all on the same team, that our goals align, and that nobody is selfish. However, repeatedly, I’m proven wrong and forced to reevaluate. When I don’t figure out the lesson after GLARING examples, the Universe forces my hand. Forced. Growth.

I was searching the internet yesterday for a photo to use on this, and another blog. I knew that I wanted a lotus. Nothing says “forced growth” better than a flower that cannot grow, but from the murky waters below. No mud, no lotus.

Pretty much all plants are amazing in this way. They’re buried underground, and from the dirt, beauty and abundance take form. They face uncertainty, predators, adverse growing conditions, flooding, drought… everything should be against these tiny seeds, and yet, many of them survive and thrive. There are boat loads of casualties, but the standard is growth.

Nature WANTS plants to make it. So does the Universe. Just as in nature, the Universe WANTS us to be fruitful. Just as seeds, we are hardwired for survival.

So what lessons am I being forced to learn this year? Notafreakingclue. But I can say for sure, that if this year is anything like the last, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Truthfully, I’m still licking my wounds from 2018. The sting is still very real. But this train is full steam ahead. There’s no stopping it. How many metaphors can I mix? The world may never know.

It’s hard to grow. They say adversity “builds character”, but I’m kind of over this “build, burn, rebuild” cycle. I just want things to be easy for a change. Smooth. But as I keep trying to assure myself, the best is yet to come. However, the realist in me knows, as the Buddha described “life is suffering”. So to be without suffering, we are without life.

Thanks for reading.

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