I’ve been crying a lot recently and I don’t really have an explanation for it other than I’m getting older and wiser and the world is growing both more damning and more beautiful. News articles abound with now more than ever and in times like these and this fatalism often obscures the miracle. We’re still here. Yes, we are living in a time of catastrophe; which is also to say, we are living in a time of possibility. And so, “what shall we build on the ashes of a nightmare?”
I feel like I’ve been trying to answer this question for years, and I think I’ll keep finding new answers the longer I’m *gestures around* here. That said, I think I got somewhere with something I wrote a few months ago.
I work at a social impact non-profit and every year we’re assigned a colleague to create an award for (I find myself adding some offhand, sarcastic comment every time I share this, but truly it’s such a sweet tradition). I gifted the following poem and a pretty purple bouquet of flowers to a coworker I admire, deeming her “The Mindfulness Queen”. The more I return to and read the poem though, the more confident I am that I wrote it for myself just as much as I wrote it for her.
For when you need a reminder
Breathe.
There is still beauty here.
Look there—
Without a second thought, a teenager, AirPods blasting and shoes loosely tied, tucked his skateboard under his left arm and offered his right hand to a young mom carrying a stroller up the subway steps.
And at the end of a long week a coworker remembered your coffee order and picked up a cup just for you. Because they wanted to.
And now you’re laughing because you’ve checked your phone and your grandmother’s just texted you for the first time. It’s full of typos and random emojis, but mostly love.
And because you were so pleasantly surprised by this text, you laughed so loud! Your giggle caught the ear of a nearby toddler, who’s now smiling at you from the shoulder of his caretaker while you all wait to cross the street.
Breathe.
Pause.
It’s that time of year where Christmas trees and fallen leaves finally get to play
And it may be a cold day but the sun is doing that thing it does
Chasing after the shadows, dancing across the water, warming up your cheeks.
There is beauty here.
When I was little I was prone to lollygagging, frolicking, meandering
My mom used to call me a dillydallyer
Which I always thought was a delightfully perfect word for a kind of freedom
Just blissfully, intentionally mindless —
Which in itself is a kind of mindfulness.
And actually I think we need more dillydallyers
More jubilant, free adults. More possibility models.
We’re all a little too serious, a little too not here, not now.
But me, I want to dance in the rain and smile at the sun and laugh at my own jokes and play in the leaves and celebrate the typos and see the toddler smiling at me.
Our attention is so precious and
Our brains are so powerful that
We can make things holy just by looking at them.
These days I’m just as likely to jump for joy
Because I ran into Oprah on the street
As I am to cry out in wonder at some pretty purple flowers growing in a ditch.
Have a great week, beautiful people. Live in the along, don’t be too hard on yourselves.