My second stint in the mountains feels different than I expected. While I miss the awe and wonder and the newness of my first trip, I’ve discovered a familiarity that is deeply comforting. Everything feels less intimidating, including myself. I am a year older, and so are the trees. I am a year wiser, the trees are as wise as they’ve always been.
Earlier this week my oldest daughter, a psychology major at USF, shared a social media post with me – a square with the word “trauma” on it multiple times with a caption defining trauma in an unfamiliar and slightly disturbing way. She was curious about my thoughts, which sparked my own curiosity about my thoughts, which sparked multiple conversations with multiple kids and even more thoughts. Apparently trauma is trending.
While 2020 provided ample opportunities for working, meaningful conversations, and great memory making with my kids, there were a few unexpected lessons along the way – and it all ended up being quite an adventure in balance, acceptance, and grace.
Overlook 10s are not bad decisions or wrong turns or missed opportunities. They are not unrealistic expectations that go unmet. Overlook 10s are doing everything right, and things still not panning out as you’d hoped.
It's a weird season. Time itself has become a strange phenomenon - more relative, more subjective, and both more and less significant. Everything has slowed as we find ourselves collectively and individually stumbling around in the dark, looking for a new normal. Fear and hope can exist at the same time - as can science and spirituality. I just have to hold it all loosely - and if there has ever been a time to hold things loosely, it's right now.
It’s day three of staring at the dead flowers on my dining room table. I still find them beautiful - nuanced and layered and wise. They’re making a mess though. Every day more leaves and petals adorn the wood beneath them, and I feel sad when I look at them. They are fully - dead.
I can decisively and efficiently move through a professional creative project with objectivity and fortitude. A personal creative project? Cue inner turmoil and second-guessing and procrastinating and chaos.
Music has been such a gentle and patient friend for decades now – one of the few spaces where my mind, body, and spirit are fully integrated. Even the language used to describe the artist’s intention for a piece of music also accurately describe the human experience – dynamics, harmony, lines, spaces, tempo, resolution. And dissonance.
The point was not that bandaids actually made anything better, but that they made my kids feel better. It didn’t matter that the skin hadn’t been broken or that the source of their pain was invisible - a bandaid brought comfort.
I didn’t know about the middle. The middle is tricky – a paradox. The in-between is filled with cognitive dissonance and fluctuating desires.