the way spring has sprung this year is different than the last.
I wonder if you wait for the flowers to pop their beings out of the cold, wet earth the same way I do, with an anticipation, and a hope that has held you through the dark of winter.
I can’t say this year is any different. The first day when the air smells just a little warmer than the crisp cold that goes straight to your bones. It’s just a tiny bit sweeter, but it fills you with more and you find your shoulders relaxing and your breaths deeper.
It’s been a winter, that’s for sure. Our household is full of questions this year, what if’s, how to’s and where should we’s. All with ….’s after each one, full of the unanswered. There is anxiety that I never felt before. I watch the world around me, feeling like it’s all falling to pieces. People can’t afford to live. Other people are being blown up for no real reason. I wonder where the humanity has gone. There is no humanness in this. And even if you are someone who generally lives with a positive outlook on life, a glass more than half full type of person, it starts to affect. So I find myself sitting on the stairs some days, unable to move with a deep anxiety that courses through me, with an understanding that there is not much that keeps me in my house as opposed to in a tent on the street other than damn luck and a few good financial decisions. But all that could easily pass. In a month, two, three. And there is humanness is this. In understanding that I am not different than you. In compassion and empathy for the Person sitting next to me, for the Person standing on the corner asking for change. Just one thing to change. Instead of averting your eyes, meet them. You don’t have to give anything but a smile of understanding that tomorrow, it could be you standing there hoping for one thing to change.
I don’t write this to bring you down, I always stand up and walk down the stairs and allow the gratitude for the life I’m privileged to have and the dreams that also fill my brain to fill my glass back up. I let the anxiety roll through me, I hold it and examine it and am curious about it, but I also don’t let it define me and I don’t let it live my life for me.
Maybe some of you can relate. I never felt this way until I had babies to watch and hold through the darkness until the first breath of spring fills our lungs. Life is full of everything. “Let’s be brats” as my friend Caralee always says to shake off the hard and choose to really live. The sun is shining so I can hardly see my screen through the fingerprints. And isn’t that beautiful.