Category — Uncategorized

Yes to everything in this post. Yes to believing that 2020 would be defined by the Australian wildfires. The virus was still a quiet news story back in January, whereas the fires were immediate. They were horrific. They were all we could talk about. Even if you told me at that time that the virus would eclipse the wildfires, that it would become the defining news of the year, I couldn’t have fathomed what that meant.

But what I loved from this post was the capturing of how we can feel two very different things at the same time: Anger and tenderness. Grief and joy. Fear and calm. The wildfires and COVID shock. She writes:

The coexistence of two seemingly disparate emotions may shock us, yet we’ve proven how it’s done over and over: Our enraged bodies are still tender enough to scratch a dog’s ears and our devastated hearts still beat wildly at the sight of mountaintops from a plane window.

Which leads to her point: our feelings are just feelings. They aren’t immutable facts. And we can feel two different things at the same time, and neither feeling cancels the other one out. And then she travels into the damage done by purity culture and the either/or thinking, and its emergence online. How it plays out online. How we process it online.

It’s really a breathtaking piece, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I am a rule follower. If you tell me to close my fitness rings — no, if you even hint that it may be a good idea to close my fitness rings — I will close my fitness rings. This weekend, I hit 365 days in a row of closing all three rings, which means I started wearing the watch about 365 days ago.

I am really proud of myself. I mean, yes, I’m a rule follower, so I was going to hit this milestone. But a little over a year ago, I was barely exercising at all. And I went from morning yoga to morning yoga and afternoon walk with random dance or biking challenges thrown in for good measure. My thought is now, “How will I get my exercise in?” and that is a HUGE change for me. All because I put a band around my wrist that gives me a reminder that I need to close my fitness rings every day. Huge thank you to my sister for passing along her old watch and getting me moving.

Because my natural inclination is not to move or go outside. And while I still rarely go outside, I fight against my desire to sit and read 100% of the time every day.

It may be a little win, but it’s my win. With my sister’s help.

Sometimes you make the right decision, but that doesn’t mean that it will feel good. There are right decisions that feel terrible, but that doesn’t mean they were the wrong decisions. And that is one of the hardest things to remember when you’re slogging through your feelings.

There are decisions that you make because life gives you two choices, but you don’t want either one. You would almost rather make no decision than choose between your two choices. But one day you realize that you must — for your own sanity, you must — so you look at your two options, and you choose the one you can live with. You wish there had been a third option, the option you really wanted. But it’s not there, and you can’t force it to be there.

Living out a choice is sometimes easy, especially after a lot of time has passed. You can go days barely remembering your decision, and then weeks or months or years not remembering it at all unless someone calls your attention to it. And then life-changing decisions have a way of dragging you back to the pivotal moment, making you look back and wonder if you made the right choice. But you know you made the right choice. It was not the wanted choice, but it was the right choice. And you tuck the choice into the back of your mind again and remember that right decisions don’t always feel good.

They don’t feel right, even when you know they’re right.

And then one day, your decision is finalized. You reach a no-going back point, maybe not realizing the no-going back point would arrive on that day. But one day you wake up and you realize it’s there. The no-going back point tears open every Band-Aid you slapped over the decision wound, and for days you walk around wondering how no one else notices that you have this gaping hole where your hope once lived.

And then there is the day after the no-going back point.

And the one after that.

Sometimes you read about someone else’s story, something completely unrelated to your own — to what you are grappling with or trying to make sense of. But somehow it fits. It teaches you. It shows you a way forward. It helps you make sense of limits.

Stories can make the world make sense.

I read a fascinating (and very short — in case you’re intrigued and want to read it, too) book recently: Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson. There are zero spoilers in this post.

Two college acquaintances bump into each other at an airport during a flight delay. They’re hanging out in the first-class lounge, and one tells the other a story about how he saved a man’s life and everything that came after.

There are several questions that keep percolating up as you read the story: Can we live with ourselves if we don’t think we’re a good person? Who defines who is a good person? Do good people always do the same good thing, or are there dozens of good actions in the same situation? And is being good something we do over and over again, or can one really big good act define us? If we do one bad thing, does it erase the good?

Chewy questions. And I didn’t even get to the really deep ones because those would contain spoilers.

But my favourite was an unspoken question that came up early on in the story: Are we owed anything if we save someone’s life? If we say no, does the answer change if the person is rich and can afford to give a reward? If we say yes, does the answer change if the person is poor and cannot afford to give a reward? And then is it about the action (saving someone life) or who we save (rich person vs. poor person)?

What do you think?

Two years ago, the twins were sent home from school for two weeks to stop the spread of COVID. They didn’t go back until 18 months later. Two years ago, I wrote in my bullet journal that the stores were empty and cases were multiplying. We felt panicked but also had no clue how bad things would get — could not fathom 6 million people worldwide would be gone by this date in 2022. That almost 1 million of those people would be in the US. I’m not sure what I was worried about back then because, like I said, I didn’t imagine this.

Last year, I wrote:

Today marks a complete year at home. No in-person school. No in-person work. No in-person social events. No visits inside a home. I went from mostly paper books to mostly e-books. I went from no plants to an indoor herb garden. I walk in place in front of YouTube videos.

I’ve stopped believing this will be over soon.

We were still at least a month away from being able to get our first vaccine dose. It felt like it would never be our turn, and once it was our turn, that we would be able to get one of the coveted vaccination appointments.

Things look different now, even though I don’t consider things over. Not close. But we’re triple vaccinated, own a ton of KN-95 masks and wear them everywhere, and feel comfortable venturing back out into the world with precautions in place. We still get meals to go, but the kids are back in school and we’ve been to the theater. We visit people indoors with masks. We don’t feel limited, even though we clearly are more limited than we were a little over two years ago before COVID started spreading around the world. Maybe it doesn’t feel limiting because it’s so much more than we were doing last year at this time. For that, we’re grateful.