Gratitude

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I am so grateful to be where I am today instead of where I was last year at this time. 

Let me explain a bit. While I think I had this blog at the time (I’m pretty sure…), I don’t remember how much I shared, if at all. I may not have blogged at all at the time, now that I think about it. Just existing was enough. 

I was really sick with an infection about a year ago. The details aren’t important, but I’ll just say that it involved multiple courses of antibiotics, a hospitalization (and IV antibiotics) barely avoided, multiple visits to my health care providers, and parents who were so worried that they flew 1500 miles for a one and a half day visit. I lost more than 15 pounds – that I couldn’t afford to lose – had no energy, and still had to do my more-than-full-time job, as well as try to keep my life running. 

I could barely move off the couch some mornings. I slept more than 9 hours a night and was still exhausted. Even thinking about any type of exercise – walking, let alone running – made me laugh, it was so unthinkable. 

But I kicked it – with the help of modern medicine. And now, a year later, my leg and foot may look different due to the long-term effects of all of this, I am so so grateful to be healthy. I am so grateful to be able to run. To be able to stay awake for a full day without having to rest on the couch multiple times (or, honestly, put my head on the desk). To be able to fully focus on my work and my life without feeling like I am moving through thick mud, with a rope around my waist pulling me back. 

I am so grateful. 

Left turns

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I think we all know that life has unexpected turns and twists… and that trying to anticipate exactly what our lives will look like in the future is an exercise in futility. And yet, I persist in thinking that I can predict where I will be, what I will be doing, and with whom, far into the future. I think most of us do this – and if you are the rare person who can truly live in the moment and not project forward into the future, well, I envy you in some ways. 

Life rarely aligns with our neat and tidy predictions. The challenge for me, as I’m sure it is for many other people, is recognizing this and accepting it. Knowing that, while I have control over my actions and choices, I don’t have control over what others do, or what happens in the wider world. 
And sometimes my choices set me on a path that maybe wasn’t the one that I wanted my life to follow, but (as is typically the case with these things) that didn’t become apparent until after the fact. 
It makes me wonder, what would have happened had I made different choices? I have always loved the movie Sliding Doors. The concept – that we have parallel, simultaneous lives unfolding that result from different choices – has always appealed to me. A similar concept – the multiverse – was in Blake Crouch’s book Dark Matter. 
What would my life be like now if I made different choices in the past? What would have happened if I had listened to my gut and turned down the wrong job for me several years ago, when I became convinced that the job I was in was the wrong one? Turns out it wasn’t just the wrong job, but the wrong location. My gut knew this – I cried during the entire two day drive to the location for the new job – but I wasn’t willing to listen. 
Recently these thoughts have extended to more personal aspects of my life, in addition to job-related changes… namely, what would my life have been like if I had never gotten married? If I had married someone else, at a different point in my life? If I had been able to have children? 
So many questions, yet no answers. This is the life I have. And it’s a good one, despite my occasional bouts of questioning. The challenge for me is accepting that, while looking into the past is appealing at times, the only thing I control is the future. 
What choices will I make now that will influence the path of my life in the future? 

Kai Skye, as always, nails it with this… 

If I see clearly now, how will I use that to make the best choices for me, for the future? So many questions… so few answers. And only time will tell… only in hindsight will I see that where I end up is the result of the decisions I make now and in the future. The life I have is the only one I WILL have. Time to make the best of it. 

Blocked

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I don’t write here on a regular schedule, but I do try to write here regularly. And I feel like I’ve been MIA. I’ve opened the Blogger tab multiple times, but never made it to writing a post. Yesterday, it finally occurred to me that I feel, well, blocked. There are so many thoughts in my head right now – so many things to worry about, to remember, to keep straight. And, of course, as we all know, there is so much going on out in the world. I just keep thinking that 2020 has even more surprises up its sleeve… (do years have sleeves? anyway…) 

Sometimes when I have writer’s block related to work, and I’m stuck on a manuscript or some other writing, my solution is just to close my eyes and type. (Side note: thank goodness I learned to touch-type when I was 8… it has served me well lo these many years. Thanks, Dad!) I’m finding that it’s the same here. If I just come and start typing, the thoughts come – and sometimes, they’re even coherent. I’m not sure if these thoughts reach that relatively low bar, but it helps to get them out on screen, even if they’re jumbled and messy. 

At this point in the year, with so much going on with work and life and people and politics and the country and world, I feel like I’m constantly searching for calm, for equilibrium. Digging through all of my quotes for some guidance, some reassurance, I found comfort in this: 

“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
~Rilke

I am not a patient person. I stink at uncertainty. But living is really the only choice, isn’t it? The answers will come. Borrowing trouble, worrying about things yet to happen, is not going to change what ultimately does happen. And it robs me of the now. 
It’s time to remember that I don’t – and won’t – have all the answers when I want them. They’ll come in their own time. I just have to remember to live the questions, and breathe, and trust. Easier said than done, but so much better than the constant mental hurricane of whirling thoughts and questions. 

Freight trains and fire hoses

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I’m not sure what metaphor to use for the last few weeks… whether it’s been a freight train or a fire hose hitting me. 

Personally, professionally, politically…there is just so much. And sometimes it feels like too much. I try to remember that others have lived through times like these – times when the disasters keep coming, one after the other, but that only brings so much comfort when I bury myself in the news and find myself despairing of things ever turning out okay.

If this sounds like I’m not okay – don’t worry, I am. I’m not in the pits of despair (although I may have come close this weekend, with the news of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death…). But it is just, well, a lot. 

Things have really taken off with the semester and keeping up with readings, classes, commenting on posts, and grading assignments has taken up a large part of my time. 

Dealing with personal relationship issues and trying not to push them off to the side because, well, I can. (I’m guilty of trying to avoid these issues sometimes…) 

Trying to remain connected to those who support me and give me strength, and recognizing that this is essential to my well-being (vs. just taking time away from everything else). Remembering to email those who have many more challenges than I do. 

And then, well, the national disasters. I said I don’t like to get into politics but at this point in 2020, it’s impossible not to. 

200,000 dead. One of the worst responses to a pandemic in the developed world. Unnecessary death and suffering and difficulties for families across the countries. Fires raging out of control. So many hurricanes and tropical storms that we’re into the Greek alphabet. An illegitimate president (sorry, it’s my stance) doing everything he can to hang on to power to continue his destruction of our democracy, aided and enabled by the worst possible political allies and sycophants. The death of a feminist icon, a Supreme Court justice who stood for women’s rights, voting rights, and well, human rights, likely to be replaced by an ideological opposite who makes me worry for the future we are leaving our children. 

It’s just. so. much. And yet, I know we’re not the first country to go through things like this (I originally wrote “challenges” but that’s much too wishy-washy a term for everything going on). And I try to remember, as the inimitable Leonard Cohen said… “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” 

Perhaps the cracks in our society, in our world, and in our personal lives that have opened in 2020 are providing the means by which we will move into a more enlightened future. I can only hope – it’s what I have left. 

Breathing…

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 Last week was a doozy. I knew that it would be, with the semester starting, classes resuming, and everyone’s anxiety high (including mine, of course…). But oof. I made the huge mistake of working Monday, taking a furlough day on Tuesday, teaching all morning on Wednesday, then having my usual cleaning-and-shopping on Thursday morning (it only takes about an hour and a half for everything). Needless to say, I felt less-than-productive by the time Friday rolled around. 

I’d say that’s a pretty accurate depiction of where my mind was on Friday morning. 

The challenge for me is the idea that I have to be “productive” all day, every day. I need to remember that there will be days when I don’t check tasks off the list, but I will be productive despite that. It was definitely productive to spend four+ hours with my students last Wednesday. They don’t know me (yet) – I don’t know them (yet). Many of them are new to the program. We needed that time to interact (and yes, we were able to, even online… yay…), and learn more about each other, and think about how we want this semester to go. 

Not helping are my annual fears that this is the semester I lose track of everything I need to be doing, working on, etc. Balancing everything is a perennial challenge. It hasn’t happened yet, but my mind (see above) is always reminding me that I might drop all the balls, and then what? 

Times like this, I need to remind myself to just. breathe. Panic isn’t going to get me anywhere (well, it might get me into a worse mental state, but it won’t get me anywhere good…). 

So I’m trying to remember that I need to breathe. That I am one person. That I’ll keep the balls in the air, as I always do.