About six months ago (maybe more, maybe less), I ran across a saying that became my mantra:
Whatever you
Are not changing,
You are choosing.
Read that again.
It helped me transform some bad habits into positive motion, and I stayed on track for a good while. Then... coronavirus (dum dum dum dum!). I continued my focus for another two months, but have recently found myself straying from the path, even falling into wallow and roly-poly modes, two of my biggest downfalls. Woe is me. What's the point? Where's my purpose? I wrote to a friend the other day:
"It's raining again here. How appropriate. Almost two weeks of daily downpours. You are the unfortunate recipient of my fatigue: coronavirus isolation; marital relations; social injustice; missing live music, browsing the library shelves, hugging my grandbaby, going to Publix instead of having strangers do my shopping, sitting in a booth at my favorite Thai restaurant to enjoy veggie Panang curry. Do you yell at the TV when people shake hands? ("no, you can't do that now!"). On the few occasions I am in the car, and see people driving while wearing masks, I wonder if I've just been dropped into a nightmare/science fiction scenario, and pinch myself to wake."
Time to recalibrate. Much to be grateful for. So many blessings. Started last night with a Dar Williams livestreaming concert, celebrating Patty's (her manager's) birthday, in which Dar played "deep cuts". Wow, what a setlist! I was invited, and eventually migrated over, to the Old School Dar-Listers watch party, connecting with dear friends I've had for decades, forever-bonded over our favorite singer-songwriter. I am committed to carrying that spark of joy back into my daily life, and adding in more yoga, more stretching, meditation, more phone calls with long-distance friends and family, walking, even leisurely (gone by the wayside because of my sciatica), natural VitaminD, whether at the condo pool (socially-distanced, of course) or the grassy area in front of our building, kinder words, deeper understanding, open heart/closed mouth, more radical self-care, increased vulnerability, letting go of past hurts.
Forlorn/lonely... begone!
[updated at 5:30 p.m.: I uploaded this post a bit after noon today, and since then, after doing much thinking, as well as having a productive conversation with a friend, I realize that so much of my angst comes from *struggling* with the times we're in. I am attempting to push back against an immutable situation, a *global* pandemic... clinging to my old life, fighting "the new normal", when what I really need to do is to find acceptance (I swear I had it at one point!). I keep talking about "the other side" of this, when there is still so much uncertainty, and no one knows where we will land, and what it will look like. I seriously need to stop drawing a line in the sand, visualizing there and here, Point A to Point B... and rather look at it as a journey, circuitous at best, winding along with perhaps no immediate plan in place, other than to connect the dots One Day at a Time, making the smartest decisions possible ("do the next right thing", as Glennon would say), and maintaining a Buddhist attitude of acknowledging there is pain and suffering yet striving toward non-attachment to the outcome. I feel better already... :-) ]
P.S. Another joy-sparker tomorrow night: Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile, Eric Church, Kacey Musgraves, and Bill Murray will remember the life and music of John Prine during an all-star online special on Thursday. Picture Show: A Tribute Celebrating John Prine streams June 11th at 7:30 p.m. ET via Prine’s YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch.
SONG: I Know Alone by HAIM (lyrics in the link; thanks to my son Rob for the heads-up to this song... 💓 )
BOOK: On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard by Jennifer Pastiloff
POEM: Quarantine Day 35 by Jaime R. Wood
The online coronavirus survey asks
if you’ve experienced hair loss
and you laugh because just yesterday
you took brand new clippers to your scalp
and sheared off enough hair to help someone
with cancer feel human again.
Your friend told you over Zoom happy hour
to hug yourself to trick your body
into feeling less lonely, so you wrap your arms,
right to left and left to right,
across your chest until your hands reach
your shoulder blades and you can feel
your heart beating inside you
as if it belongs to someone else,
but you know that hasn’t been true for a long time.
You stay up all night watching hospital dramas
because you want to know who will live
and who will die.
And one morning you wake to find out via email
that one of your students died in her sleep.
All day you tell people again and again,
“She had kids. She had kids.” Plural.
But it turns out she only had one
five-year-old daughter. Singular.
But what does it matter?
Every child is a universe.
And one morning one small girl in Portland, Oregon
woke up without her one very important mother.
Sometimes my hands shake with all they cannot hold,
and I don’t know how to measure what it means
for time to pass. Which simile will do?
Like a heartbeat?
Like a million fine hairs falling from a head?
Like a mother who slept through the night
and then stopped, her universe carrying the weight
of her through all the days of her life?
[Jaime R. Wood: “The ongoing event that we’re all experiencing right now is social isolation in an attempt to protect ourselves and our loved ones from COVID-19, and some people, like me, live alone, and so the isolation is profound. Last week, I learned that one of my students died in her sleep, and of all the things I knew about her, the thing I kept thinking about was the fact that she was a single mother and that her kids were young. I knew that, but I couldn’t remember how many kids she had until someone told me that she only had one, and at that point, it didn’t really matter to me. The loss is great, no matter how you calculate it. The loss of this one woman, and my feelings about it, can be multiplied many times over and applied to each of us. We wake up and fall asleep to loss, and there aren’t adequate words to measure it all.”]
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