Launa’s astonishingly beautiful blog has done it again. I love the subtitle, that it is about taking a year away to get back home. Her most recent post, about how she has found, in this year “off,” a place where she can breathe, where she can sleep, where can stop “white-knuckling” her way through her life really moves me. I’ve excerpted my favorite passage, the last three paragraphs, but the whole thing (and the whole blog!) is well worth reading.
It is intensely familiar, this sense of holding on so tightly but not being sure either what it is that I’m holding, or why. This feeling of crossing off days with “relief, exasperation, exhaustion and regret.” That’s not every day for me, but it is too many of them. And, like Launa, I don’t like it. I guess it’s progress that I have finally begun to see through the fog to what it is that I think I want my reality to look like next, the challenge is getting from here to there. I need to trust this incipient sense of what the next step is, and to find my way there.
I love the image of “sitting inside of change” and know for sure that I have no idea what that would feel like. I’ve never sat still long enough. My summer of rest from running was a tiny, teeny version of that, microscopic. And even that was hard for me! I hope that someday (soon?) I will be able to summon Launa’s courage, and strike out myself to find a way to discover such stillness, such rest, such peace.
Abigail will be eight on Saturday. I want to write down every day and every change, as a way of holding on to time as it moves past. Late last winter into the spring, I crossed every day off the calendar with a combination of relief, exasperation, exhaustion and regret. I knew then that was wrong, and that it was no way to live; worse, I knew that I had talked myself into that life, and into that state. I had nobody but myself to blame, and had forgotten that nobody but me will remind me to live.
I fought this move, hard. I couldn’t believe, back then, that moving away, specifically moving so far away, would sort out whatever it was that was making me cross off the days and white-knuckle through the nights. I just couldn’t see what was ahead, so focused was I on where I was. Poor Bill, who had not only to make all the plans and scrape together the visa, but also to withstand my foul moods and grouchy premonitions of disaster.
For the record: he is often right, and I am wrong. But he has never, ever, been so right as this time. Now I can let myself feel the days, the hours, and the minutes passing without so much argument. I have the wholly unaccustomed pleasure of just sitting inside of change. I have the surprising gift of sleep and quiet and calm. Rather than crossing off my days, I can grow slow through these last few months of this fourth decade of my little life, and into a century and a Millennium that will roll along ahead of all of us, no matter whether we sleep, or where, or how soundly.