Youthful Life: X

10/5/19 Dear Mommy, You are loved. We love you. I love you. You have lived a life well loved. That sentiment of a life well-loved is two-fold. You have been someone who has adored others with a love that can only be described as extraordinary, and been one to have been surrounded by love for all of your days. You were the embodiment of love. You were love exemplified. You were pure love in human form. What a grand gift it was to love and to be loved by you. Your love has been indescribable yet powerful beyond compare. Your love has been transcendent while being grounded. Your love has been everlasting even when we thought it would end. Your love, your love, your love, has changed the world, your world, our world, my world.             Mother to all, this life well-loved is represented by the number of people here and around the world thinking about you in this moment. Your impact is immeasurable. What you meant to people cannot ...

  "Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else." Fred Rogers Relationship in all its forms are about choice - intentional choice to be in community, to remain in connection, and to maintain contact . Relationships means to choose someone over, and over, and over again - time after time, without fail. When we do don’t choose people that is us effectively losing them, whether it be through choosing others, or permitting a conscious/unconscious uncoupling. Either way choice has to be an active decision, one that requires effort, sustainment, and commitment. Choice must be demonstrated. Choice must be renewed periodically. Choice must be refreshed consistently. Choice is personal. It's individual, nuanced, and specific.  When we choose without gravity, sincerity, or gumption, those are the choices that are easiest to give up on. When we choose without the full force of our hearts, spirits, and souls there is not enoug...

" Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming." Robert Tew Knowing ourselves is one of the great mysteries of life. There is always and always more to uncover about who we are and who we believe ourselves to be. The reconciliation of those two makes for a challenge of lifelong proportions. As we have new experiences all of our past, our processing of said past, and the progress we have made since come together to inform our present selves. I have spent much of my adult life bracing for impact. I am just waiting in perpetual flinch for something to happen. I am wincing for a pain that I know inevitably will come. It's odd to live such a bright life with the conditioning that darkness is almost always just over the horizon. Call it pessimistic but I call it pragmatic. There have been so many moments of joy that were interrupted by heaviness that directly called me to attention.  One text message, a phone call, a tweet, and on, and on. Wheth...

" You haven’t healed, I can tell from how cruel you are.” Warsan Shire We're all carrying things with us. Some of things we're carrying visibly weigh on us while others are cloaked but remain heavy nonetheless. The thing about heaviness is that we have the potential to transform it. Oftentimes we get caught up in believing that the hardships we carry will be part of us for our entireties. In reality, we can shift the weight, redistribute it, or even better lighten the load. I don't think we ever really unload all that has stayed with us but I do believe that we can compact it, extract its essence, and convert it into something more manageable or even useful. What a powerful sentiment. There's hope in that.  If we don't have to hold all this heaviness forever that can mean a great deal for us. That means that how we feel, what we're holding, and how we're carrying it will not always be this way. Things aren't hopeless. While some things may...

" Self-deprecating humor and brutal honesty is a really freeing thing." Margo Price Self-deprecation has its place in our communal communicative wheelhouse. And, it's not meant to be the primary way that we share who we are. Lately, I have been noticing that some of the people around me exclusively speak about themselves in the negative, whether facetiously or not. I did not realize how pervasive it was until I started paying closer attention. Right off the bat it's straight to the self-deprecation. That's it. All I know about some people is the things they have downplayed as insignificant, and all the ways that they are inadequate (by some arbitrary standard). I don't actually know who they are because what they are communicating, whether purposefully or by force of habit, is an incomplete blooper reel.  Moderate self-deprecation communicates self-knowledge, endears, and encourages others to loosen up. Toxic self-deprecation articulates an unhealthy s...

" Stop holding your truth; speak your truth. Be yourself. It's the healthiest way to be."  T iffany Haddish What are we afraid of? Why do we hold back? How are we stopping ourselves from saying what our hearts yearn to say? So much of life, connection, and relationship is left unsaid. We hold back from sharing what is on our minds for a multitude of reasons. What we don't realize is what we lose in the process of stifling our voices. When we shut ourselves down we teach ourselves that we - all of us, our truths, our stories, our thoughts, are not worth sharing. The more the we do, the more we reinforce that the words we have to offer are unworthy of the air. Smaller, and smaller our voices become until we talk ourselves out of sharing our voices at all. It is wise to be thoughtful in what we share, but intentionality is also sharing bravely. The things that we stop just short of saying often are precisely what we need to say. It's right there. It's jus...

" The failures that you beat yourself up over are the ones where you experienced warning signs and can connect the dots backwards after the fact." Caroline Ghosn Searching, yearning, looking for a sign. In the world around us, and the people that occupy it, we look for signs. Some kind of guidance, advice on who to be, or just affirmation that we are doing what we should be. There's this pressure, learned, and applied liberally that tells us there's both a right and a wrong way to exist. There's a values judgement applied to us and who we are. There is an assessment that we are constantly placing on ourselves, and onto others, and them unto us as to the righteousness of what we do. We look for signs to make sense of what goes on around us, about why the world is working the way it is, and about who we're meant to be. Signs have this power to both obscure, and to provide clarity when we seemingly need it most. Signs are all open to our interpretation. We ...

"Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen - that stillness becomes a radiance." Morgan Freeman People keep saying that they can't sit still. Are we addicted to being busy? The constant go, the organized chaos of it all, and being productive - is that where we derive personal value from? There is something to be said about us being incapable of being still. This need to go, go go - where does it comes from, and what do we let it drive us. Much like most things in life, stillness is a learned practice. It takes patience, diligence, and persistence to normalize being still. Especially in a society that communicates to us that stillness is wasted time that we could be doing something else, when in actuality, stillness is part and parcel to us showing up in all other capacities. Stillness let's us breathe, be where we are, and take note of how we're doing/feeling. Stillness let's us pay attention more closely, notice the world and pe...

" An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings." Margaret MacMillan Stop apologizing for the harm other people cause you . Stop forgiving people before they have done the work to ask for it or to change. Stop letting well-meaning people or “good intentions” dismiss their impact. It’s their job to own their impact; not yours to rationalize it away. Hold people accountable for their actions and their impact. People don't get to barrel through lives or the world without being prompted to look back and see what they've left in their wake. When we don't address the harm and its cause we deny ourselves healing, and closure, and let someone continue their behavior without knowledge of its impact. If we care about people, particularly those close to us, we will hold them accountable. We are obligated ...