Change

I’ve written about change before – how I hate it, how it hates me. How I cringe at the thought of trading one routine for another. How the idea of relinquishing irretrievable days makes me feel claustrophobic and anxious, like I need more time, more space – more everything.

Right now I’m clinging to summer’s ashes. There’s a kiddie pool outside full of dirt and leaves that I refuse to deflate. Its neighbor, a lingering jalapeño plant that used to be a full-grown vegetable garden, desperately needs pulled. I have flowers to pitch and tank tops to put away, jackets to buy and lesson plans to make. I’ve been here before, at this inevitable intersection between summer and fall, so its sights and sounds are not unfamiliar. Cooler nights and earlier bedtimes come in waves, an undercurrent of reluctant anticipation fueling their advance. I envy those who ride them, their worries buried in the sand with these last transient days of August.

Feet below the surface I wonder if they’ve ever felt the agony of resistance. It sucks down here, all this open space with nowhere to breathe. “Just relax,” they tell me. “Just relax and you’ll float.”

Those are tall orders for someone who craves control.

But I’m trying. I’m trying to keep my thoughts from jumping too far ahead, from sprinting off to a time that has yet to exist. I’m trying to pay attention to what’s in front of me – of the reality that’s sweeter and kinder and realer than the one I’ve created in my head. I’m trying to embrace the rapids, to relax, to float.

I’m trying to recognize all of this for what it really is – change, and nothing more.

There are books about Buddhist meditation and mindfulness scattered throughout my house so I won’t forget that a transition is a transition and not a catastrophe. (I feel silly even typing it because the truth is so glaringly obvious on paper – isn’t it always? – and yet often in the dead of night it’s anything but.) “Don’t resist discomfort,” their pages say. So I try to acknowledge and allow it with the soft detachment it warrants, because if anything brings me peace it’s the words in those books.

All around me life is happening. Tonight during supper Molly took me by surprise and started counting. Five numbers slid off her tongue like water – fantastic new words I had no idea she’d been harboring. Savannah, a precocious three-year-old who’s started using phrases too big for her mouth, put her little sister to bed with a goodnight kiss and Curious George story while Geoff and I beamed from the hallway. There’s Netflix’s fall lineup waiting for me tonight after the girls go to sleep and a classroom full of students waiting for me in the morning.

It’s when I’m immersed in truths like these that I’m able to see the shift from summer to fall not for what I’ve painted it to be – a cruel, treacherous ocean – but for what it really is.

A puddle – single and harmless and, if I’m feeling extra adventurous, brilliantly inviting.

Puddle

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Hollie says

    I love how you take us on the journey from untamed ocean to stompable puddle all in one post. What great imagery to hold in my minds eye as I too try to breath and ride out this transitioning season.

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