Everyday Gratitude

Feed Freckles, make my coffee, write a little bit, jump in the lake, go in the hot tub, make my oatmeal, start the day. My day starts early, somewhere between 530-6 am. I love the early morning when the black sky slowly lightens and the outline of the trees and power lines and houses around me become visible. On lucky days, the sky might eventually brighten to a swirl of orange or pink or purple. 

I love tiptoeing across the dining room floor so I don't wake Lucia below me. I love turning on the coffee pot that I prepared the night before, opening the fridge to get the milk, and steam it in the frother as I prepare Freckle's food. I love the moment when he gets his first mouthful of food and I get my first sip of hot coffee. 

I love lighting my candle, sitting down at the dining room table, and writing the thoughts that visited me as I slept. I love the moment when I close my notebook, grab my towel and robe to meet Genessa for our daily jump in the frigid lake. I love the short conversations we have to and from the lake. I love when we have time to jump in the hot tub for a few minutes to warm our freezing hands and feet. I love the tingling feeling that comes as my body goes from the extreme of cold to warm to hot. I love boiling the water for my oatmeal, greeting my family as they wake up, and talking about what the day ahead will look like. I am filled with a profound sense of gratitude by 8 am every morning. 

I am a creature of habit. Regularity is like a big, heavy, warm blanket for me, the feeling I imagine a toddler has when her mother scoops her up and envelopes her after she's wiped out on the playground. Each morning ritual is like a deep breath, soothing me, and reminding me that I am safe and sound, that I'll be here again tomorrow, same time, same place. 

The pandemic time has given me permission to live this heavily ritualized life in a way that I didn't before. Pre-pandemic, every day was different, depending on what appointments, plans, or meetings I had going for the day. Now a plan is a big deal. Going hiking with a friend means figuring out how to get there in two cars, where to pee along the way, what sanitizing products to bring. Even going to the grocery store includes thinking about the time and how busy it will be, reviewing my list multiple times to ensure that I get everything we need, and of course wearing a mask. I don't want to make plans anymore. It's too complicated. So I keep with the simplicity of the structure I've created.

What will happen when we return to how it was before? Will I be able to maintain this heavy, warm blanket feeling? Will I make time for these rituals that bring me so much comfort? Will the feelings I have now live inside of me in a way that I can touch back into when my life looks and feels very different?

I fear the next phase. As much as I want to hug my friends and live without worry and despair, I fear what I will lose when I am not steeped in this feeling of gratitude for the tiny moments of joy for coffee, oatmeal, the lake, the hot tub, my precious full mornings. When I taught yoga I would tell my students to experience the moments when they felt really present and alive, to be still with those feelings so that they could tap into them when they needed them during moments when they craved that peaceful feeling. "Try to embody this moment right now" I would say. Embodying comes from living something, doing it so much that it is in your body, like a new organ or appendage, whatever the thing is, it becomes part of you. 

My hope is that when we come out of this pandemic, I will have embodied this sense of gratitude for the small things that I have now. That I will walk around with these tiny memories coursing through my body, reminding me of the possibilities that live inside of me. The future is unknown. I can't say if this set of beautiful morning rituals will be with me in one month or one year. All I can do right now is stay with them, keep practicing them, and taking time to feel the joy that comes from each and every moment. And then hopefully, in six months or two years from now, I'll remember this time and it will nourish me as it is now.

Lessons from the Passenger Seat

I didn't learn to drive until I was twenty-two. My twin sister got her license at sixteen but I never felt the need. I grew up in Chicago and rarely left my neighborhood. When I did, it was easy to get my sister to drive me or to take the bus or the train downtown to go shopping or see my grandparents. I went to college a short plane ride away and on one of my trips home, the woman checking me in at the gate asked for my driver's license. I only had a state ID, a form of identification commonly used as a fake ID back then. The woman told me that I'd need to bring a passport or driver's license the next time I flew. So, that summer my mom gave me a few lessons in the parking lot of 47th and Lake Shore Drive and I took my test. I passed, but barely.

My car is cracked or dented on all four corners, each bumper showing signs of ineptitude. It's a family joke and I take the ribbing about my poor driving in stride because, let's face it, it's all true. I'm also highly anxious and kind of overbearing. When my daughter Lucia turned fifteen, we started talking about her learning to drive. Because of my nagging, anxious tendencies, and my less than stellar driving history, I was considered the last person in her cadre of supportive parents and stepparents in her life to be her driving mentor.

Lucia and I started driving together a few weeks after she started her online driver's ed course during the beginning of the pandemic. Taking practice drives to the drive-thru Starbucks a few miles away was a great way for Lucia to get a little bit of driving experience. After a few drives, Lucia said, "Mom, you are so relaxed when I drive. It's surprising!" And she was right. I felt completely at ease, wholly trusting of this 15 1/2-year-old new driver. I didn't worry about her navigating the tight corner into the drive-thru. I didn't worry about her pulling up too close or too far from the payment window. I didn't worry about her at yellow lights or left turns. 

Having a teenage daughter is the gift our mothers give us. I remember my mother saying, "I can't wait until you have a teenage daughter." And now I say those exact words to Lucia. I am the most uncool, most annoying, least understanding human in my daughter's life. I don't "get" anything. My rules, ideas, and suggestions are an insult to Lucia's budding independent spirit. Her developmental cues are telling her to be in charge, not me. And of course, I, as her parent, still feel compelled to offer my guidance, to shepherd her into adulthood safely and securely.

But, when we are driving, when I am in the passenger seat and Lucia is behind the wheel, there is a recalibration of all the energy that we normally create when we are together. I surrender to her being in charge. Not consciously. It just happens. Maybe it is my lack of driving expertise that renders me so comfortable with Lucia at the helm. But whatever it is, it works. When the two of us are in the car, we are in a groove. She's in charge and I'm not. 

When we are at home, my role is to be in Lucia's business--- about her school work, cleaning her room, her phone, her plans. She never asks me for advice about any of this. She doesn't have to because I always preempt her. It's my way. But when we are driving, Lucia has questions. She needs me and she gets to be in the role of asking me for help. She has technical questions about rules of the road (which I generally cannot answer), but also subjective questions like, "Should I start changing lanes now?", "Why didn't that guy use his blinker?", "How should I pass this biker?"

It's a perfect situation. I, as a poor driver, have little room to offer advice. I'm inexpert and it works for Lucia because, in almost every other realm of our lives together as mother and daughter, I am (or at least I think I am) expert. It's great practice for us both. Lucia gets to drive. She will have to be in charge of this task eventually, both in the car and in other realms of her life. And I get to take a back seat, something I have accepted as a passenger in the car but will have to embrace more fully as Lucia's independence grows. I'm grateful for this driving experience we are sharing. It's a microcosm of the bigger picture of our lives. I, the worried, neurotic, clinging mother, get to watch my smart, capable, competent daughter moving towards the ultimate independence she will soon fully inhabit. Lucia is a good driver. She's on the road and she's going to be just fine. 

The Space Between

Photo by Genessa Krasnow

We're so close to something big happening, some kind of change. I can feel it. But at the same time, change seems infinitely far away. It feels like Groundhogs' day every day. In the last ten months, I've had moments of feeling okay, even kind of evolved in my perspective about the teachings of life in a pandemic. But I'm not feeling like that right now. I am heavy and dark and carrying the weight of it all right at the center of my chest. It feels like a ten-inch lead cube wedged right at my sternum, sharp and pushing up and down and to either side. I know it is anxiety. I know, because I can psych myself out of it. When I laugh I can breathe. When I am writing I can breathe. When I am doing craft projects or baking I can breathe. It's when I am talking to someone about the news or looking at my calendar trying to make plans or lying in bed in the dark before falling asleep, following one rabbit hole of fear after another, that I cannot breathe deeply and fully.

The more I lean into my anxiety and fear, the more I understand about it. I still struggle with my heavy, tight chest, but I am learning more about it. I am unveiling new truths about how to welcome the anxiety and form a relationship with it. The more curious I become about my anxiety, the more I can see what is on the other side. A week ago my friend Genessa and I decided to do a cold plunge on Sunday morning. We went down to Lake Washington at 8 am and dove in. It was freezing but invigorating. We decided to do it again the next day and the next and the next. We've done it every day for a week (I missed two mornings and her one for work), and it's become something I look forward to doing at the beginning of my day. My sixteen-year-old daughter Lucia even joined in two days in a row. 

What I notice about the plunge is that there is much to learn in the moments right before the plunge and right after, but the greatest teaching is in the one second of actual submersion.  Right before diving in, I feel afraid, resistant. I don't want to be that cold. I could just turn around and put on my robe. But then, almost like tricking myself, I do it anyway. As quickly as I dove in, I rear up out of the cold water, screaming, running for shore. I am elated, excited, flooded with happiness. In that moment I can do anything. I am exactly where I should be.

In that moment between the fear of diving in and the joy of popping back out, there is complete and utter stillness, like pausing a movie or a total blackout. The shock of the cold water is so forceful that, for a moment, I lose all of my memories of the past and worries for the future. I am completely present to that singular moment between fear and safety, warmth and cold, resistance, and triumph. 

In that split second, I am the confluence of all of those opposite thoughts and sensations and emotions at the same time. And it's like a magic portal opens and there, on the other side, awaits joy. I can breathe deeply and fully into both lungs. The giant lead cube shrinks to a spec. I can see, in technicolor, the sky above me, the pebbles on the beach, the geese flying just above the water. I can feel the air on my skin, the gentle wind tickling the droplets of lake water. I can hear the laughter of Genessa and Lucia, their joy meeting mine like a wave as we all make our way towards shore. 

The Eye of the Hurricane

Being in the unknown is hard for me. Truth be told, it's nearly impossible. I have immediate and persistent physical manifestations that remind me I am struggling. Like many people, my dis-ease appears in my breath. I can't get a deep breath. Each time I try to inhale, it is like a bird flying freely and then smashing into a window pane. The breath reaches the spot right before my lungs open and gets turned around. I try again and again until finally I can get a deep breath. But the multiple attempts render me even more anxious and frightened. This newest COVID surge has got me back on the crazy train and I'm in a daily battle with my breath.

The teacher in my meditation group told us yesterday that she likes to start her day by stepping outside and feeling the weather. But before she does that, she says, she does a brief inventory of how her internal weather looks. My partner Nancy is from New Orleans and has lived through dozens of hurricanes. Last night she was talking about the eye of the hurricane-- the moment of quiet where it seems like the storm is over, but it's not. When the storm comes back though, is unknown. Without warning, BOOM!, it's back. When she was talking last night I realized that this is how I feel when my breath is tight. It's dark and ominously still and scary and I am petrified in waiting for what comes next. I hate this moment. I want it to be over. My weather right now is that of a hurricane, in the eye of the storm, hidden indoors, trying to avoid the inevitable winds and rains and floods that I know will come before the storm is over.

About a month ago, one of my oldest friends disappeared. She's still there, but she doesn't want to be in contact with me. The circumstances are complicated and confusing. The truth is I don't fully understand why she doesn't want to be friends anymore. I tend to be direct, maybe too direct. I want to work it out, talk it out, get to the bottom of it all. But that's not her way. I understand now that her way is to do what she's doing-- to disappear. 

In response to her dropping away, I've had to do some uncomfortable self-study about my reaction to her disappearance. My feeling of discomfort is familiar, like a mild version of my anger, fear and frustration about COVID.  I am sitting in wait, anticipating if and when this friend will show up again. But my real feelings are bigger than that. I am mad. I am hurt. I am outraged. In not giving myself permission to feel those feelings, I am putting myself in the eye of the hurricane. I have rendered myself powerless, waiting for her to make a decision. Sitting in the eye of the storm is the safest. I'm contracted, not letting myself feel the full range of real feelings about this friendship. I know why I'm sitting here, waiting. I fear that if I let myself go beyond the eye of the storm, into the turbulent emotions that are really there-- the mad, sad, and rejected feelings-- that I will not be able to turn back, that I will be saying goodbye to the friendship forever. 

It's the same with COVID. In really sitting in it, acknowledging how painful the losses are, I am letting something in that I really don't want to let in. I am opening myself up to a reality that deeply saddens and frightens me. But being a bird banging into a window over and over is not fun. I don't like being here. I would rather be in violent wind and rain, knowing what is happening, than in this waiting, the unknown, anticipating the destruction at any moment. At least after the stormy weather I know there will be a moment of calm.

And so it is-- the only way out of this emotional hurricane that has hijacked my breathing is to move beyond the eye of the storm. I must venture into the torrential rains and gale force winds of anger and sadness and loss and fear. I have to make room for all of that before I can step out into a clear blue sky. And even as I write these words, understanding their truth, I can feel my chest soften. I feel a sense of relief. I can breathe again. 

Longing

I am aware of great longing in myself and others these days. Longing to get on an airplane and celebrate Thanksgiving with family. Longing to hug my best friend instead of nod from a distance. Longing to make a plan of any kind without contemplating the new rules and the new fears. 

My sister Katherine gave me a bizarre, complicated craft project for my birthday a few weeks ago. It is a sticky sheet with thousands of tiny color-coded squares that, when filled in with thousands of tiny crystal beads using a tiny tweezer-like tool, makes a complete image. Mine is of three dandelions in a rainbow of light. It took me a while to get into it, but now I find great pleasure in the tiny-ness of this project. Tiny bead by tiny bead it is slowly coming together.

Last Thanksgiving my two sisters and their families came to stay and we had a houseful of crafty, musical, hilarious people. Tons of food, games, and family dynamics. It was a multi-day love fest. The dining room table where I do my new beading project is the same table where we all sat last Thanksgiving-- painting water colors, playing cards and Bananagrams, eating meals and chatting. As I placed the little crystal beads on their respective squares, my mind wandered to this time last year. My heart smiled as the images flowed through my memory.

For a moment it was as if I was looking down at myself; I was standing at a crossroads and my choices were to go towards the longing or to be in the present moment. In one direction were dustings of last year's memories still floating around me like smoke from a candle just snuffed. In another was me, sitting at my dining room table beside the warm, lit fireplace, the sounds of my daughter and partner somewhere in the house, my lukewarm, half-filled tea cup sitting next to my beading project. It was a micro-moment where I somehow made the choice to be here. As if waking from a dream I was back in my project, engaged and enjoying the present moment. I was aware that the longing was still there but it wasn't nagging or painful. It didn't take away from my joy. 

Thanksgiving looks very different this year. And I'm okay with that. 

Goodbye. For Now.

I'm getting ready to rally my family to make a Gratitude Tree. It's a Thanksgiving ritual that I started when my daughter Lucia was four years old. Now sixteen, she's not super into it but agreed to do it as a birthday gift to me. I schlepped the collage supplies up from the basement and they sit in wait on the dining room table. To make room for the Gratitude Tree, I will have to take down the Ofrenda I made for the Day of the Dead this year. I have on it photos of people who have died, people I loved who I miss and honor. 

This morning as I sat at the dining room table drinking my coffee, I spent time looking at all of the images of those people. I've been thinking a lot about my dad's death. It's fresh in my mind because of the recent passing of my sister-in-law, mother to four wonderful children, the youngest of whom is just twelve. My brothers were just twelve and fourteen when my father died almost twenty-five years ago. I'm thinking a lot about them, wondering how Dad's death changed their lives.

My dad's death, and all of the deaths I've experienced in my life, affected me profoundly. When my Nana died, just a few months before my dad, I had my first understanding of what a soul means to me. Being raised in a secular household, we didn't talk about what happens after one dies, so I had to create my own understanding. After Nana died, I could still feel her. The memories and the visceral sense of love from her was still with me. And then when Dad died I felt it again. The longer they were gone, the stronger the sense became. I understood this internal sense to be the presence of their souls. In my ad-hoc, non-religious definition of what the soul is, I understood that the soul never dies. This gave me comfort then and it gives me comfort now.

When I look at the images of my grandmothers and grandfathers and my father and my Uncle John and my sister-in-law Shannon and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I feel a sense of peaceful company. These beautiful souls are still with me. I wonder what they would have thought about this time we are in now. This Pandemic. This political mayhem. My Jewish dad used to have a large marble bust of one of the popes. On it he placed sunglasses and a scarf around his neck pinned with buttons from different lefty candidates and pro-choice campaigns. My dad would have been so outraged at the state of the world. My dad would have adored Ruth Bader Ginsberg. 

I am grateful that my grandparents didn't have to live through this time stuck in their assisted living facilities or alone in their apartments with a nurse, no family able to visit. My memories of them are of swimming, the lake cottage, the fourteenth-floor apartment on Lake Shore Drive, ice cold carrots in the square tupperware in the fridge and fresh picked corn on the cob in the summer. My memories of Uncle John are filled with laughter-- silly, borderline inappropriate jokes that only he could tell, and always a warm smile. The memories of Shannon are the most fresh, the ones that have got me thinking about my brothers. Shannon--a mother, filled with love and nurturing energy, buzzing around to make everyone happy. The missing is sharpest in the beginning. Maybe the soul hasn't quite settled, isn't yet available to the living. 

I remember the sharpness after Dad and the others I loved died. It felt like an undigested meal, uncomfortable and irritating in my stomach. But over time, the sorrow broke down and found a home within me. The memories were no longer painful. They were nourishing and comforting, reminders of the presence of their beautiful souls.

Shutting Down

Our country is on high alert. Everyone is nail biting and processing and perseverating on what's happening next. The waiting is unbearable. I have put myself on pause in order to function. I pretend that I am living on a very small planet with just a few people. I walk my dog hoping no one will stop and talk to me about the elections. The news is too much. What do I believe? Who do I trust? Nothing is simple. I am a big picture person, someone who doesn't focus on the little details. I've never been one to analyze the nuances or subtleties. My family laughs at me because I basically feel my way through life. I wait until I feel clear and then I act. 

It's not that I don't care about facts. I do. But these days, in order to get to the truth, I have to find my way through so many opinions and facts (real and misleading), numbers, policies, precedents. It feels like I'm a first grader trying to work my through a comprehensive legal brief on social security tax fraud. It's too much for me and so I turn off. I depend on other trusted people-- my partner Nancy, my daughter Lucia, and my very political friend Genessa, to glean through the garbage mountain of bullshit and tell me what I need to know.

Once, when Lucia was in fourth grade at a brand new school, her teacher sent her and another boy Peter from their portable to the main school building to deliver a note to a fellow teacher.  Lucia, having only been into the main building a handful of times, assumed that her classmate would lead the way and do the job. But when the got to the classroom Peter told Lucia to go in and deliver the note. Lucia, scared and unfamiliar with the scene, asked Peter repeatedly to do it. He continued to refuse. On Lucia's final request Peter looked directly at Lucia, closed his eyes and slumped his body against the wall and, in a slow robotic voice spoke the words, "Shut-ting do-own....." and became completely unresponsive. Lucia had no choice but to deliver the note herself.

When Lucia shared that story at dinner that evening we all laughed at the situation. It was such a creative and effective way for Peter to get out of something he didn't want to do. And by shutting down himself, Lucia had no choice but to take the lead. Though his actions left Lucia in a hard spot, Peter was clearly coping in his own way. He must have sensed that Lucia would be okay doing that task. And she was. Lucia and Peter went on to become friends and have weaved in and out of friendship for several years now. 

I used to feel bad for not being up to date on all the current events, consumed by the news like my parents. But I realize now that it's not only that I don't want to, it's that part of me can't. It's not the way my brain works and I don't want to force it in that direction. So now, like Peter, I am shutting down. As the waiting continues I am a broken down robot, dead battery, short circuited, mainframe blown. I am shut down. Every day I turn on for a few minutes and ask Genessa what I need to know. Then I go back inside and wait again. I'll turn on again when the waiting is over.