Friday, April 24, 2020

A Simpler Life

I’ve been sitting with a growing feeling. My beloved, enthusiastic nutritionist gave a lesson in growing micro greens yesterday. I have the image of this feeling sprouting and spreading much like those micro greens will if I ever get around to planting them. I know what’s growing and it feels wrong to admit it. It is a fear of this time ending. Who wouldn’t want a pandemic to end? Of course I do because I don’t want to see any more suffering or dying, or our economy in shambles. But, there is this other side of me that has some dread about life retuning to the way it was. I think to myself, my gosh Jean, how bad was it? I used to feel a similar dread when I lived in the city and we would go to the country for a retreat. On the last day I would cry not wanting to return to the life I had. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my life either! Then it was a mixture of the pace of city life, pressure to produce, and the lack of nature that I didn’t want to return to. What is this dread now? It has something important for me to know. It’s telling me that it’s time to pay attention. As much as I am resisting leaning into what is there, I must. The hesitation is that it will ask something of me that will scare me. That’s what dread is, isn’t it? It will ask me to take a risk or to step up in a way that frightens me. It’s almost easier to stay in the dread than to see clearly what is being laid at my feet. Once I look, the path will be cleared before me and I will have no choice but to follow it. Of course I do have a choice, but I know myself well enough to say that if there is an opening I will have to see where it leads, scary or not.

What do I not want to return to? The busyness. The running around. The setting up of everything. So much setting up!  The effort. In these pandemic weeks of lockdown, I don’t feel as though I am working less. In fact, my work feels more involved, more challenging. But there is a simplicity to the way it is right now - the way life is right now that I am deeply appreciating. Simplicity. As I typed the word, it resonated through me. Yes, it is simplicity I am wanting to hold on to. Maybe wording it in the affirmative rather than the negative would be more useful…not focusing on the dread, but what I am drawn to. A simpler life. 

Outside of lockdown, what makes this a simpler life? Grocery shopping only once a week for starters. That’s easy enough. Small in actuality, but huge in its impact. Working from home. Who knew I would like it so much? No rooms to set up, no big transitions to make, no place to drive to. More spaciousness in the day. Having more meals as a family. I love making the kids warm lunches and having them sit at the table to eat, all of us taking a break from our work. Seeing people walking and knowing people are in their homes. Less honking horns and speeding cars down our residential streets. More quiet. Less pressure to do, to be, to get somewhere, to move ahead. We have no where to go right now and what a relief that is. A simpler life indeed.

So I think to myself, how do I maintain simplicity post-pandemic? The grocery shopping shift is easy enough, but the rest? That I am not so sure. It feels like a bigger shift is in the works, one I can’t yet imagine. So many things I could never have imagined have happened in my life. I need to remember that. Then, I need to get some clarity over what I really want my life to look like, unabashedly admit to what I truly desire, which feels different than it did back in January when I wrote my yearly intentions. Everything has changed. Can I say what I want in this new place and not hold back from it because I “don’t deserve it” or because I am “not good enough” to do it, or because of financial fear. I do trust that if the changes I make come from a good motivation; if they bring more goodness to the world, then they are possible. They need to be honored. 

What has this time inspired in you? By the time it is over we will have gone through a process.  It will be different for all of us depending on what we witnessed, what we were asked to let go of, what we made of it, how we grieved, what we learned. We can return to life as it was - just move on with business as usual, which might be good enough. Or, we can lean in to this place that is not the same and invite ourselves to meet what is here with an open, courageous, loving heart and be curious what the universe is asking of us all now.

1 comment:

  1. I've been thinking about this idea a lot and I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts. Is this time so unique because we don't actually have to choose it for ourselves? And what happens when the world starts to buzz again and we must consciously choose to keep this simplicity? I like the idea of really sitting with this, letting the feelings come, and learning from them. Thank you for reminding me.

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