The weather is affecting my mood. I believe this is natural, but something about me, in my nearly-36-year-old body, right now. I feel like my palms are on the moon, my heart beating with fahrenheit, my hips in cadence with the sky’s hue. Things feel electric and heavy, as if the plight of humanity depends on the sun’s proximity to the horizon.
Am I making sense? I didn’t plan to write about that and then opened a window and wrote it in an exercise to begin writing when I didn’t feel like it but knew I needed it. When does that start happening – when we do things because of our soul’s greater good rather than doing exactly what we feel like? You know, like my kids. They wouldn’t have cleaned their room when they would rather scale their bunk beds, even when there was a little spark of remembering how great it feels to have a flotsam-free floor, shirts in the shirt drawer and beds without hair barrette shrapnel.
When do we learn to acknowledge and reject the sirens who lull us into the tempting waters of irresponsible indulgence, instead choosing bigger-picture satiating shore?
When do we grow into pushing ourselves to be better humans, make better choices, love better, live better? What does that mean? My kids think about better differently than I do. To them better means skipping a monkey bar seven times in a row, writing pages and pages of phoenetically spelled essays without fear of doing it ‘wrong’, the glee in skiing fast and in control.
And while I envy my daughters’ faithful commitment to this very moment, I also appreciate the beauty in my experience, learned behavior, distraction and forethought. I am thankful I know my dog is aging and I know what that means. I get on my knees and circle her torso with my arms, memorizing her happy grunts and waggy butt. I am thankful I understand the strength that follows a effortful run, especially when dreaded. I am thankful to know that honesty and authenticity are the most important elements of everything, always. I am thankful to choose my daily mantra and then rechoose it. I am thankful for wrinkles and humility and fucking up and growing from it. I am thankful to witness and learn from the spontaneous, microcosmic whimsy of childhood, as a grown up.
I am thankful for these things because I have experienced the other side of some things; I have stories and I benefit from their outcomes. There is redemptive, explosive beauty in our corrupt, saturated, brokenness. I remember the other side of my experience and that informs the next time. I know that I don’t know! and in the not knowing, a giant exhale lives. That exhales roars.
So this lunar, precipitation preoccupation I am in. It’s moving. I know wind is fickle. I know a season’s blood pressure is affected by my own and vice versa. Maybe the question isn’t when do we do things because of our soul’s greater good rather than doing exactly what we feel like? Maybe the question is how do we do exactly what we feel like because it is also our soul’s greater good?
Maybe we possess perfect wisdom as children, grow into injured, skeptical adults and further grow into perfect, sage, healed-injured skeptics looking to the stars for answerless fodder.
