Forgotten on the way

It’s been a minute, Reader, because, as you know, I spend half my time in Atlanta, half in Richmond. I work full-time, I’m in school full-time, I’m taking care of my mother, who isn’t doing great, and I’m writing a novel (what? Okay, maybe you didn’t know that. That’s new.). I’m learning banjo and ostensibly ham radio. In other words, I am usually overwhelmingly, excruciatingly, busy.

Busy is good. Busy means I don’t have to think about death (okay, I DEFINITELY think about death), or about how America is on fire and democracy is collapsing, or about how my life is in the most complete and utter state of transition it could possibly be in, and how slowly losing my mom is one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through.

But it also means I don’t have time to think about all the things that are really, really good, either.

Recently, I had the chance to go to an awesome person’s house, with another awesome person (that would be Debbi and Patrick, who have Substacks that you should definitely read), and slow the fuck down. Yes, we wrote a lot. But we woke up early, we went on walks, we stood outside in the country, we ate blizzards at the BEST DAIRY QUEEN IN AMERICA. We watched a woman at that DQ feed ice cream to a raccoon behind a dumpster. We ate good food (at places other than DQ), we watched the fireflies and thunderstorms, we compared my height to bales of hay (the hay nearly won).

I’m not a fan of toxic positivity, or telling people to be optimistic when shit is bad. I don’t see how that helps. I often struggle to just be in my feelings, and so I dislike telling others not be in theirs. But I do think it’s important to remember that all the good things are still out there in the world, just waiting for us when we’re ready to notice them again.

It’s easy to forget those small things, like petrichor and lightning charge and giant hay bales and writing in morning sunlight that’s really far too bright but it’s so good you can’t move and would rather squint at your screen. And I think that I’ve been so busy being busy, that I have forgotten some of those things along the way.

Being busy is a healthy way to cope with overwhelming circumstances (my therapist repeatedly assures me), because sometimes there is so much going on that distracting our brains is the best way to soften the emotional blows that keep coming.

But being busy is also exhausting.

And I need to remember that it’s good sometimes to switch from a wide busy focus, to a slow microfocus, it’s good to see all things still out there, waiting to be remembered.

Which is not to say that that America isn’t on fire, or that I don’t have 34095978739329084 things to do and phone calls to make, or that watching my mom get sicker and sicker is going to stop happening. It won’t. But both the slowness, and the remembering of all things good, and the busy-ness and the overwhelm can be true at the same time.

We forget that life is complex, and that there isn’t just one truth or way of being. Multiple things can be true at once.

I can be sad and frustrated and helpless and still notice that the moon looks like an orange slice, so brightly citrus I can almost taste it. I can get stuck in my grief, trapped in the amber of memory, and also get stuck in the endless present. I can be busy, but I can also be slow.

I tend to get trapped in ruts, going forward in only one way, and lately it’s been the busy way. And that’s okay, too. Sometimes, we just need to be one thing for a while, and for me, that’s been busy.

But the greater truth (if there is such a thing) is that there is no one thing. There is no one mode of being. We are all the modes, all the time, always shifting, never solid. And sometimes, when we step in the river, that same river that we can never step in twice, we just focus on standing up in the rush of water. And sometimes we let go and float with the current or the rapids. Either way is fine. Sometimes we stay ashore, and don’t even bother with the river. And sometimes we have one foot on shore and one foot in the river. It’s a good metaphor. One I particularly like, and not just because it’s flexible. It’s because we’re also the river, and we, too, are never the same twice.