Surfacing, Or What Letting Go Feels Like

Today I can drop my shoulders and exhale, unhurried and able to stare out the window of this coffee shop or at the dainty cinnamon swirls in my miel. A long weekend of sunshine and water healed the last of my unsutured wounds. Somehow I’d forgotten what’s needed to grow and how inevitable it is, like this certainty and spontaneous dancing in the living room was always waiting for me once I could get myself there. Get myself out of three (or arguably more) years of murky emotional depths. 

For years I held my breath, knotted with tension and anxious worry, at the bottom of dark water and have only now surfaced into the sun and air. Of course, the sun, the surface, the air, the delight have been here hovering out of reach, but my eyes were cast into the opacity of the deep. 

When on the verge of drowning, the body is a clenched and fearful thing incapable of rescuing itself. I imagine only more darkness, more worry, more held breath. The water churns as I kick and wrestle my self-created eddy—until I don’t, and it doesn’t. 

When I stop, I catch a glimpse of shimmer above, and so I emerge instead of sinking and realize three years of anger and sadness, of rumination, melancholy, and resentment is enough. I have swum in the depths long enough to know it all intimately and to know also that I can release those heavy ropes where I’ve clung for closure. 

I can believe genuinely and wholeheartedly that my future will be better than my past. I have to trust that I will have more fun than I did on my first study abroad in London. I can remember it fondly but have to unattach myself from the belief that it will always be the best time in my life. London, I let you go. 

And along with it, Alex, I let you go if you were ever even mine. I let go of the idea of a marriage and flat in St. John’s Wood and two little girls with brunette curls and French names. 

Bartosz, I let you go, too, and the wonder of you and the worry of your welfare. I release the needing and the trying too hard to be what you needed. I forgive myself the grand airport moment failure. 

Which means I must also forgive myself for choosing Scott and make peace with the scared girl who was so afraid to never be loved that I settled for years of not loving. I let go of that empty husk of marriage. 

The marriage ending that ferried me to Rob with his handsome jawline, wild hair, and strong hands. I release the wonder about you and of Jesse with the sad eyes and Casey’s smile and all the crushes that never were. 

And you, Jake, I let go of your betrayal of my trust and my naive love for you that was so entangled in our movie moments. 

Joey, I let you go, too, and the dreams where my subconscious still holds you. You will forever be my first love, but there will never be more time, only your back to me and your avoidant eyes when we passed in the hall. I let go of the hurt and forgive myself for the way I suffered over you. 

Lindsay, I release the final clutch of our friendship and all those inseparable days. I relinquish the hope that we will ever be close again but remember you with gratitude. Now I let so many friendships go and try to savor them for their fleeting golden moments. 

I let go of the hope my family will ever be less chaos and more easygoing sweetness, accept we will never be the Tanners or Walsh’s despite the ice cream in the kitchen. 

I let go of a life of no kids where I live as a writer and editor in New York City among books and jazz cafes. And, most significantly, I surrender the fantasy of the time before Finn and forgive myself the past three years of ugly soul searching rage and pain. 

I let it go. 

I let the lingering curiosities dissolve. 

I doggy paddle my way to shore and beach myself in the sun and wind. It’s not a pressing down, not hiding, not pretending to be fine. It’s finally freedom. A lightness of joy, love, and abundance that has been here all along, though I couldn’t see it or appreciate it. It’s Stephen and Finn and Wes clambering to the summit of the mountain, their fearlessness and spark as they peer down at me and wave. I’m thankful I didn’t lose myself so completely as to have lost my way to their shore, so thankful it brings me to the verge of emotional swell.  

I unfurl my clenched fists that have held so tightly to the ropes as I waited for closure, for answers, and open my palms to let go like a tree in autumn doing the most natural thing. The only way to grow is to shed. I release it all, all of my past loves, all my past lives lived and unlived, the questions and longing and dreaming. I don’t need the weight of that anymore. 

I am good and beautiful and whole as I am in this moment of realignment with my bare bones lovely self. I am wonderfully complex and also, importantly, as simple as a tree or a lotus flower pushing through the muddy water and muck toward the light. Always toward the light. 

Swimming in Summertime Sadness

I feel sad on the inside of my skin. This line and its associated sensation resurface in me from time to time, never leaving me fully in a state of contentment. Today things feel particularly vulnerable.

Workdays and my boss keep me chronically stressed alongside the swell of debt we’re continuously trying to doggy paddle out of. My toddler remains a challenge that taxes me deeply even as he delights, and three years after his birth, my body still refuses to budge in the direction of trim and toned. My relationship with my parents teeters on the precipice without a clear understanding of just how far the landing lies, or if it’s even possible. I’m tired of treading water.

I raise the stakes, raise the optimism like a veil I can see right through. It’s my attempt to reframe and see my life through the lens of love and gratitude. It feels, though, like I’m squeezing glitter glue into the folds of my fears and insecurities to kintsugi myself into a vessel better suited for holding joy and beauty. 

These glittering fractures formed under the constant pressure to be happier, slimmer, more polished, to make more money, be a sweeter wife and stronger leader, to be a more nurturing mother and more accommodating daughter and sister, to live in a cleaner house with nicer furniture, to have just done something worthy of dinner party fodder. But how is it possible to be all of that?

Is it truly for me or for the long-held expectations for a life well-lived? Maybe I’ve trekked after the wrong things and worn myself out in the process. Realistically I don’t know how to seek the alternative. There are still bills to pay, a job to do, kids to tend. I don’t know what an upended life looks like at this point stripped from the cliche of midlife crisis. A plunge into dark waters without knowing how long I can hold my breath only to emerge on the other side of that body of water with a renewed sense of myself and vision for the future. 

These past few years have been sunk in this dark eddy, and I’ve been fraying at the edges, raging under the silent gaze, through this smiling depression that fails to dissolve. 

It’s why I journey after predictable markers of success. I see that now. They seemed like the answer, but I was asking the wrong questions. I’ve been seduced by the pitch of satisfaction and somehow gotten so much of it wrong. I ruminate and hold out for answers that don’t come readily. At 39, I struggle to view the next decade with the surety I crave. The clock ticks louder on the countdown to 40 in my determination to reassess and realign. 

I’ll claim those valleys and dark pools, peer over the cliff side, trudge mind-numbing miles if it means I will learn how to walk looking upward and outward rather than down or over my shoulder. I long to see the shape of clouds in honeyed sunlight and notice flowers bursting from cracks in the cement. 

I’ve been stuck in the illusion of forward momentum that has turned out to be a Gravitron at the funfair. I need to get off, get unstuck. How to begin? How do I know which soft bit of land to place my first step? I sense the answer is there if I can believe in my ability to see differently. While it’s terrifying to feel like I can’t shake the sadness and underwhelm, this air here has grown stale. 

Throwing myself at the idea that it’s all about changing perspective, I’m going to take a page from my toddler’s playbook. I’m going to go sit out on the deck, lick a popsicle, and stare at the rustling trees and blue expanse of sky. I’m going to try something new and then compliment myself as he does with an emphatic, “I was so brave!”

Not So Young

I’m too young for thoughts of grief and advice for processing death, or so I would have thought until I realized several of my close friends have already lost a parent. When I was seeking funeral information for the most recent passing, I came across an obituary for a woman two years younger than me, someone I’d known all throughout my years growing up and with whom I took dance lessons in middle school. If I had had cause to think of her, it would have been as a girl, static at 16. But she’s dead. While I hadn’t spoken to her since high school, it unsettled me as unwelcome reminders do, the type that refuse to let you maintain your naive obliviousness. 

I am not so young as to consider death in the abstract anymore. It’s becoming a rehearsal to identify how much grief is the appropriate amount to work one’s way all the way through it to the other side, and even then a certain scent or song might knock you sideways in remembrance. 

As I prepare to attend the funeral of one of my closest friend’s fathers tomorrow, I’m choked with emotion that doesn’t feel rightly mine. It’s her father after all, not mine, but I think of the years we were inseparable and all the hours I spent at her house and the countless interactions I had with him and how interconnected our lives were. The sense of loss pulls at me. 

It is, of course, a sense of empathy along with sympathy and sadness for my friend and her family, but selfishly (helplessly) it is a reckoning of loss for me, too. It’s the admission of disappointment that I haven’t kept in touch with my friend the way I’d like, that I’m no longer—and haven’t been for years— the friend she confides in or asks for advice. We lead very separate lives across the country from each other, but somehow I’d been able to convince myself we remained closer than we do. 

I am trying not to make it about me because I have no scope and scale through which to measure her grief, but it feels like one more string cut from the ties that once bound us to the point of predicting each other’s next sentence. I wanted to be needed in this, one of her most trying times. 

And so I am grieving for the loss of our childhood, of our adolescent freedoms, of our friendship’s former incarnation. 

Tomorrow I will travel to my hometown for the funeral, drive past our old houses and the streets where we walked to and from school, past the park where we spent afternoons and weekends on the swings daydreaming about boys and the adventures we’d have one day, days I foolishly assumed we’d share.

In the throes of teenage friendship, the kind where you can’t bear the separation of a whole class period before catching each other up on the latest, it feels incomprehensible that you won’t always be close and connected. This theme reverberates around me now as we move further into adulthood. It’s a bittersweetness to straddle youth and old age, peering back at the treasures of memory with aching gratitude and also ballooning with hope for all the life left before me. 

Any encounters with death serve as important reminders to stop putting things off playing the someday game. I am not so young. Again, I am feeling this more and more. I must start aligning my current state with my ideal life. Now. 

I need to be more present and stop stressing about how I’ll appear or about what others think of me. They’re probably not thinking about me at all anyway. I can’t prepare for everything to get it all just right.

There is no preparation for the loss, not really, whether friendship or a life. And so I’ll leave behind trying to show up to the funeral perfectly collected and too cool to cry. I will sit in the church pew, listening to the hymns, inhaling the scent of incense smoke, and allow myself the loss of her father as well as the loss that is all mine, the loss of that carefree youth and a friendship meant to withstand a lifetime but didn’t.

The Shortlist to Reset for 2024

Each year in addition to choosing a mantra, I have a quirky habit of flipping through the dictionary and selecting a word at random to be my personal word of the year. This year’s word is ‘shortlist’. While I was relieved it wasn’t something like squalor or redundant, I wasn’t quite sure at first how to work with that. And then it struck me that in this age of attention spans shorter than that of a goldfish, everyone loves a quick list. Give me the gist as succinctly as possible. 

Another perk of the shortlist is that it works in tandem with the idea of the research around habit formation working best in small bites, a la James Clear’s Atomic Habits. You can take one goal and break it down into manageable steps. Rather than facing down an overwhelming hurdle of resolutions for the new year, you have a list (or several) full of doable action items. You can post your list somewhere you’ll notice and skim it frequently to refresh yourself on your objectives and action steps. Maybe there’s one small task you could take on at just that moment, and maybe that will snowball into another and another until you’ve brought something powerful from dream to reality.

And so I offer seven shortlists for refreshing, resetting, and realigning the various aspects of your life for the year ahead.

Physical

  1. Start the day with a warm cup of water with freshly squeezed lemon.
  2. Heed your body’s cues for rest and hunger.
  3. Set reminders on your phone or watch to get up and stretch or do an activity burst. Don’t ignore them when they alert you!
  4. Dry brush your skin for lymphatic clearing and exfoliation.
  5. Create a realistic exercise regimen you actually want to stick to.
  6. Enjoy an epsom salt bath to relieve your muscles and relax.
  7. Savor winter’s bounty of roasted root veggies, soups, and stews

Mental

  1. Select a subject of interest for a deep dive over the next 6-12 months
  2. Take your vitamins and supplements that support good brain health.
  3. Start TED Talk Tuesday.
  4. Actively listen and engage in regular one-on-one conversations.
  5. Choose a new puzzle, class, or hobby to challenge your brain to think in new ways.
  6. Read at least one interesting article each week.
  7. Set a daily reminder to practice a language and/or instrument for 10-15 minutes.

Creative/Spiritual

  1. Implement/continue a daily stretching, dance, or yoga practice focused on breathwork and fully inhabiting your body.
  2. Choose a mantra and/or word for 2024. Repeat it to yourself as often as needed.
  3. Implement/continue a daily visualization practice for actualizing your goals.
  4. Reflect on learning and growth opportunities from the past year that can instruct you on modifications for this year.
  5. Read a poem, essay, or prayer at least once a week.
  6. Implement/continue a daily meditation practice.
  7. Once a month, enjoy a trip to a museum, gallery, opera, ballet, theater, or concert.

Relationships

  1. Reminisce shared memories from 2023 and think about plans for travel or everyday activities for 2024.
  2. Set a friend date for a cozy winter brunch.
  3. Practice smiling and saying hello to strangers you pass.
  4. Take deep breath timeouts when getting heated at home or work.
  5. Provide your family and friends your undistracted (read: put down the phone) attention.
  6. Send a thank you note to someone who isn’t expecting it.
  7. Leave a surprise love letter for your partner.

Purpose

  1. Determine a holistic approach to personal development and create a regimen that works for you.
  2. Set goals for this year, as well as for three years out and for five years from now
  3. Write down your goals and then break them down into smaller steps, working backward from your end result.
  4. Spend a little time each of your workdays, or at least once a week, on professional development.
  5. Plan for ways to motivate and inspire yourself and those you engage with each day.
  6. Reflect on what went well and what worked from the past year that you can continue doing.
  7. Devote time to practicing a skill or craft as you work toward mastery.

Household

  1. Finally get around to preparing your just-in-case documents, such as a will, beneficiaries, estate planning, etc.
  2. Review your savings and investments and determine if you need to make any changes. If you don’t yet have any, set them up on an automatic plan.
  3. Brainstorm ways to gift experiences more than objects.
  4. Clear the clutter and donate or repurpose as much as possible.
  5. Tackle at least one outstanding cleaning or household task, e.g., washing the curtains.
  6. Prepare for tax season by compiling necessary docs, filing or shredding ones you no longer need, etc. 
  7. Organize one drawer or cupboard each week until your house feels organized.

Community

  1. Commit to a daily act of kindness, even if it’s something seemingly small.
  2. Reflect on which charities you want to donate to this year.
  3. Determine a place to volunteer some of your time.
  4. Enjoy a local activity or event at least once a month.
  5. Hide notes with quotations or kind words for people to find.
  6. Check out your city’s attractions like a tourist and be pleasantly surprised at what you find out about the place you call home.
  7. Find out about a local issue and take at least one step toward trying to improve it.

Time for Realignment

This time of year holds such promise, forever on the cusp of the fresh start we all so badly crave. We not-so-guiltily savor the final couple days to make mistakes, eat the pizza and sweets, drink the cocktail, skip the sleep and workout, watch one too many episodes. We accept our lack of willpower before our new year’s resolutions kick in because, despite our past years’ track record, we still believe in ourselves and our ability to make better decisions in the year to come. We trust in our sense of agency to attain a future that will be better than what has been. That in itself is a testament to our will, that we can indeed bring about a more hopeful future. 

In a couple weeks I will turn 39. One year left in this decade that has been a tumult of spiraling ups and downs–separation and divorce, split custody, three different jobs, making new friends and then losing touch, living in three different cities, revisiting the dating scene, meeting the love of my life, engagement and wedding planning, marriage, buying a home, selling it and buying a new one, having a second child and all that mothering an infant and toddler entails, losing colleagues to new jobs and the stress of having to adjust and pick up the slack, COVID pandemic and the shutdown, financial highs and lows, grandparents passing away, travel adventures near and far, and the starry-eyed hamster wheel of daily life. Lately I’ve been reflecting on all the ways I’ve left my own side, of how my insecurities ruined my chances at love or success or, simply, happier living. Already I can say my 30s were brimming with both ends of the grief-joy spectrum and all the bumps in between. And yet I have the renewed fresh start effect bubbling up inside.

I have had two decades’ worth of new year’s resolutions where the fresh start momentum petered out by Valentine’s Day, but from a different angle I can see that each year also brought about at least one new habit or choice that outlasted the point of giving up or giving in. I am entering a resurgence of confidence and ownership of my choices and how my choices have taught me lessons. I’ve never stopped paying attention and never stopped learning, which is probably why I still have hope. I can see the accumulation of those changes and choices as having built myself, if not a full foundation, a peripheral ridge of peaks from which to look out and look within. It’s enlivening to perch up there on the precipice of a new year and new intentions.

2024, Age 39, you will bring all the jumbled turmoil into a place where I can untangle the threads and continue to make sense and meaning. This year will be my year of realignment. I intend for this to be a year where I show myself glimmers of my own potential. A year where I don’t quit on myself and my goals. 

It’s taken me too much time to return to my own corner, to truly trust in my abilities and in my power. No more shrinking; no more settling. I have this next year to reassess–see what worked and what didn’t–and adjust, keep learning and growing. 

I’m going to keep working on being the best version of myself and cultivating my ideal future. I will put my plans on paper, recite and visualize my best self and best life intentions until I believe them  in my very core. I will break my larger goals into more manageable, actionable steps and commit every day to doing them. I will show up in all the rooms of my proverbial house–expanding spiritually, emotionally, mentally, financially, physically, and purposefully. 

It will be a journey as each year always is, and, of course, there will be valleys of disappointment, but I have finally crested enough to smell that fresh air of possibility. I’m gazing out at a new decade not all that far off and feeling such anticipation for how much change I can bring about this year before I make the leap into my 40s. I’m cheering myself on and filling up with joy along the way. I wish everyone the same kind of outlook of excitement for the new year. 

Peace, possibility, love, and joy your way!

Energy Begets Energy

For most of my life I’ve taken a morning walk outside, whether it was the stroll to school or an early morning stride session before work. Then over the past couple years I mostly stopped due to nursing my son, sleeping a little extra when possible, and sometimes just a hurried rush into the busyness of the day. I missed my walks, of course, but I didn’t realize how much.

My energy had been flagging–in the dumps if we’re really being honest, but I blamed my lack of sleep, my needy kid, a never-ending to-do list, work stress, and on and on. It never occurred to me that I might be a big part of the problem. In the sake of preserving my sanity and energy stores, I’d unknowingly tanked them.

Instead of waking on my own terms and rising consistently at the same time to proceed through a morning routine, I snoozed until my son woke, continued half-dozing while nursing in bed, eating breakfast in a chaotic hour frittered away by whining and chores, and then retreating downstairs to a poorly-lit work office to stare at a computer screen all day. 

No wonder I didn’t have any energy. Yet I kept telling myself that when I finally have more energy, then I’ll go for a walk, meditate, write more, you name it. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t happen…Until I decided to set my intention and take action as the first step even without renewed motivation. 

My initial intention to practice yoga more often led to setting a daily reminder on my work calendar to alert me mid-afternoon to break for fifteen minutes of yoga and meditation. I’ve come away from those short breaks feeling notably better, so it was a solid start.

I then added my full yoga session back in on Sundays and noticed a similar takeaway, so finally, finally, I decided to resume my morning walk. I now get up directly when the alarm goes off at 6 a.m., dress, do a few minutes of dynamic stretches, and head out the door. It’s only twenty minutes that I’ve set aside to walk that tree-lined path, but it’s moving my body, surrounding myself in nature, breathing fresh air, and allowing my mind to wander. I come pepped up and alert, far readier for the day than I would’ve expected. Multiple weeks into resuming the routine, I’ve noticed the effect it’s having on me.

I am, quite simply, happier. I have more energy and optimism not only for the day ahead and what I might accomplish but also for planning the weeks and months to come.

It’s a basic rule of physics that energy begets energy, but it’s one that’s too easy to overlook, especially when it comes to taking care of our own depleted energy levels. We all need to write this reminder on a sticky note and place it on the fridge or bathroom mirror. Read and reread that Energy begets energy to will yourself into whatever habit might at first glance appear as yet another to-do but instead of sapping your levels will bolster them. Maybe you already walk or run or practice yoga, but what would build your energy levels is playing table tennis or gardening.

Figure out what does it for you. Maybe it’s Zumba, pickleball, or swimming. Then do that thing again and again consistently until it doesn’t feel like work at all, to where you find yourself raring to take on the rest of your day. Spend your energy to create new energy–one habit at a time until you realize, like I’m learning to do, that there is a world of possibility to take advantage of if we’re not falling asleep behind the wheel.

The Real Work of a Marriage

After the blur of a beautiful wedding day, the real work of marriage begins.

While I don’t know the nuances of every marriage, it’s fairly safe to say that even if we’ve begun to make the effort to learn from past relationships that we inevitably carry the baggage of all that was left unresolved. There are triggers that evoke frustration and habits we’ve resolved to change but haven’t yet. There are wounds scabbed over that sting afresh instantly in times of anger, shame, and vulnerability.

Healthy relationships haven’t always been modeled for many of us, perhaps too much raging or too much sweeping it under the rug until the sound of the silence pulses as loudly as any scream. It takes such effort to unlearn the thought patterns and behaviors picked up from our parents, from the TV families we watched, and from trying to forge a place for ourselves among siblings and friends. We enacted survival mechanisms and barriers that we think protect us and enable us to feel comfortable taking up our own space in the world. 

I say this to remind myself as much as anyone else to keep growing, learning, and unlearning our way to understanding our family histories and the stories we’ve told ourselves to cope, the roles we played to keep the peace and keep things humming along, even at the cost of our own honesty, authenticity, and agency. We have to make sense of past relationships and decide the kind of spouse we intend to be today and every day after. We have to have patience with ourselves and our spouses. We have to offer grace. 

When tempers flare and the argument swirls, think of your partner as a small, doe-eyed child. We flex tendencies we’ve witnessed in our parents, in other role models. Under the snapping and judgments lies our collective anxiety, lies the pressure to always be on. Under the anger lies a hurt built from all the ways we’ve been let down. We get defensive in our attempts to maintain perfection, pull it together when we don’t feel like it, shove down our emotions and faults all while sacrificing our own humanity. 

A full, vulnerable sense of humanity is what one must bring to a marriage to make it work. You can’t bring the surface-level, Instagram-worthy-only self. It’s not even merely about accepting each other in sweats and no makeup. It’s embracing each other at your most fragile times when it feels easier to jump ship than extend one small word of apology. It’s calling to mind the reasons you fell for each other in the first place when you start to waiver or feel temporarily blinded by jealousy, fear, hurt, or anger. It’s giving the benefit of the doubt and cutting them slack.

It’s about making the conscious effort every single day to show up as your whole self with your shortcomings and bad habits as much as your radiance and optimism. Diving into all of it, all the time, is the only way to form the kind of bond that lasts a lifetime. It’s work. And it’s constant. Luckily, it’s filled with so many pearls of loving connection.

I wish to be open and vulnerable every day, to bare myself where it counts. I wish for all of us in our relationships to help each other make sense of the scars and the scattered memories and the regrets and the failures and the unfailing hope laced throughout. Be brave with your words and your eyes and your touch. Then we’ll have true peace and marriages that are undeniably better than any fantasy you may have had for yourself. That’s my wish for my husband and I and for all of you, today and every day. 

Nothing Gold Can Stay: Savoring Autumn

Early autumn is the golden hour of the year. Warm, ochre light breaks through the trees that offer new openings with each shake of the wind and pools in dappled patches on the yet-soft grass. It’s lovely because it’s a fleeting gift–a pause to harvest the last of summer’s abundance. 

This is the time of year when abundance feels so obvious, how it stares us in the face with each roadside sunflower we pass. It’s not hard to feel grateful and content when cradled in the weeks of September and early October. I inhale the scent of straw grass and ripening apples and give thanks, at the same time knowing the exhale resides just there on the other side of contentment, so near I can almost graze my fingertips along its wavering edges. 

The contentment is that tenuous. This pause will give way to the shedding of late October: leaves falling, rain failing, night falling earlier, the hint of a tan I acquired fading, mood dipping into melancholy. Each year I’m bewildered to so quickly find myself atop the threads of quiet reflection, the unspooling of daily minutiae and fragments of memories from years ago blown front and center with the tumbling leaves. 

It’s how it goes. Bright light casts shadows as well, and this, too, is beautiful because it represents how they work in tandem and the balance that hangs in the liminal space where they meet. The warmth and light are made more precious not in spite of the shadows but because of them. I, too, am both–the contentment and the restlessness. I am filled with both the autumn light and the darkness. Just as we all are. Just as any day is. Just as all of life is. 

In reminding myself of this very basic but essential truth, I can remind myself that days that bristle can be as fleeting as the perfection of the golden hour. And so the pursuit becomes not clinging to only those magenta-streaked maple leaves or shunning the barrenness but holding them both delicately and recognizing their worth.

For the next several weeks rather than mentally skipping ahead to holiday planning or getting bogged down in the flurry of work, I will find ways to savor the season. I will take the time and attention needed to slow down and rest as much in the abundance and light as in the patches of shade. I am confident that if I take the time to do these things and appreciate the moments, to be present in the delight and meaning of them, this autumn will feel just right in length no matter how fleeting.

Here are some ways to savor the season.

  1. Mull cider with cinnamon and cloves. Smell your whole house come alive with the scents of fall, and then sip it outside or in a cozy nook.
  2. Clip branches with berries and colorful leaves to form a pretty and seasonal arrangement. 
  3. Go to a local orchard for apple picking and then bake yourself apple pie or apple crisp.
  4. Go for a hike or stroll as often as you can, even if it’s gusty and raining, and see if you can notice the leaves and landscape changing.
  5. Whip up a batch of pumpkin bread; bake extra and gift it to a neighbor or friend.
  6. Take a hayride and marvel at the expansiveness of corn fields and the simple joy of bumping along in the cart.
  7. Choose a variety of pumpkins and gourds from a nearby pumpkin patch and decide a new way to display them within and in front of your home.
  8. Enjoy a bonfire in the crispness of the fall evening and marvel at the extra stars in the clear sky.
  9. Even if you don’t have kids, buy yourself some new school supplies and take the opportunity to feel like you’re starting fresh.
  10. Find a delightful spot to take in the seasonal beauty and have a picnic.

This Home is Not Abandoned

I often dream of houses, my subconscious winding through rooms that represent homes in my life made unfamiliar in the way dreams scramble fiction and reality. It occurred to me recently that this might be because in my waking hours, I find myself using the house as a metaphor for myself. In middle school I came across an ancient Eastern idea that our bodies are houses with rooms devoted to the physical, emotional, spiritual, and so forth, and I’ve unintentionally foisted this approach on my life. 

The problem is that it’s too easy to get distracted or hung up in one room and forget to circulate. I have spent too much of my adulthood as a house with just one or two lights on, spurring the question from passersby of whether or not anyone’s home or if a light was merely left on by accident. I have spent years pacing the same room firmly situated in the physical, the material–my body, my money. The floor creaks with the same recitation: It is all too much. I carry the excess weight on my frame, the stress of what motherhood and feeling like there is never enough money in the bank has done to my physical presence. It’s a refrain of worry and wishing for more passion and purpose, wealth and health, and dreaming of faraway places.

Meanwhile, dusty cobwebs have all but overtaken the untended spaces. It’s the moment now to push past the safety and busyness of routine to expand my route, explore the neglected parts of myself, and cultivate the seedling dreams in me. Run through a sun salutation in the room of spirit, spill some paint in the studio of creativity, possibly cartwheel in the playroom. I can’t even say for certain in all this time of being caught up in my predictable routines what other rooms exist. Is there an expansive gleaming, wooden floor for dancing? Is there a rink out back for ice skating? Is there a desk in front of a grand window where I can write?

I can’t take myself and my life so seriously every day. There has to be more fun. Time for riding my happy, yellow bicycle and catching a matinee, for late night bonfires and rollerskating in the living room. I want to sip coffee on the deck in the morning while the birds chirp and the chipmunk hunts for lost nuts in the flower pot. I want crossword puzzles at brunch and baking cookies with the kids who eat too much of the dough. Time for candlelit meditation, for long embraces with my husband instead of a quick peck before rushing out the door, for an evening with enough time for a bubble bath soak.

Part of my hesitation to explore these other facets of myself is that it’s not all spontaneous laughter and catching prisms of light dancing on the wall. There are a multitude of unanswered questions that surface unexpectedly like the haunting shape of a body floating to the top of the river, something that can’t possibly be real but that we also understand is sometimes exactly the ugly truth it seems. There is anger looming there, so many words stuffed down in the name of being nice. I know there is also an indeterminable sadness, a melancholic longing that is gorgeous in the way its razor sharp edges slice into the patchwork of my getaway parachute. 

I hold such depth to my hunger for more, to how desperately I have wanted to expand beyond the small spheres I’ve been spinning within. I want to fling open windows and turn on every light, electrify this house until there is absolutely no confusion from the neighbors or myself whether or not anyone’s home. I might’ve been holed up in a dormant trance, my own personal haunting, but I’m here and awake and I’m shining and shouting, “Welcome home!” 

It’s about damn time.

Grit and Pearl: Past Choices through a Both/and Lens

Most of my family is gathering at my parents’ house for Memorial Day weekend, including my youngest brother who’s visiting from New York City. I look forward to seeing him, of course, and hearing his twenty-something adventures amidst the pulse of a city as ever shifting as New York. At the same time, his stories serve as a mirror—reflecting back to me a parallel life I did not live.

When I first left for college, I thought I’d graduate into a life writing and editing from a sunlit, book-strewn studio in the city. I made other choices, one after the next carrying me further from that life, but the idea of that life— and the energy and excitement that life might’ve forged— never fully faded. A deep groove of what-if carved its way across my memory. The “memory” of what-if is triggered here and there because it’s never been covered over in my mental map the way other, lesser-desired paths not taken have been.

A handful of those what-ifs remain and, when triggered, rub a bit against the groove, reminding my neurons of this pathway’s existence and creating anew a tiny heartbreak for the choice I did not make, for that life I did not lead.

I keep hoping each instance of this will, instead of a deeper groove, smudge it out, so I’m not still sitting here wondering each May when I see high schoolers in shimmering ball gowns and up-dos why no one ever asked me to a single school dance.

Why isn’t it like the grit of sand to pearl or the river rock smoothed by the current? Is it just that gradual of a process that perhaps my what-ifs are shifting into something else so slowly that I won’t notice the change until it’s staring me right in the face?

I harbor the grit of sand for now, not because I’m sure I’m forming potential pearls of unknowable worth, but because the grit of sand found its way in and remains with me, a bittersweet abrasion that is the discomfort of growth, of transformation.

Maybe I have been looking at it all wrong. Maybe the unlived lives aren’t etched wounds in my memory but small grains of promise that I should cherish and hold delicately because they will at some point reveal themselves to be beautiful pearls gleaming in the sun just as brightly as any prom dress or city skyline.