Gratitude Practice 2020 Day 192: Our New Sabbath Mornings
There is a whole heap of life changes that I am really ready to pitch thanks to Covid-19 and all that is 2020. So much relentless change. So much unpredictability. So many disruptions to our known's. Some welcomed and appreciated and just as many not. When I am honest, all of it is starting to both wear on my nerves and weigh heavily on my head and heart. For both better and for worse, I'm a big time planner. I've won Olympic gold medals celebrating my impressive list making skills. I'm a person who works best with multiple correlated calendars. I'm a creature who appreciates routine and dependable patterns and known cycles and predictability. I like strategically mapping out successful programs and projects. This is my happy place. These are my superpowers and my strengths and skill sets and just so many of these creature comforts have either ended or shifted or have just morphed so dramatically that I'm feeling pretty raw and sideways lately.
Like everyone I know, I'm feeling the growing impacts of this season of stretching. Skating on the razors edge is so so fun...sometimes. And I'll pay top dollar to watch this kind of story unfold on the movie screen all day long. But in my little world….all this change and unknown disruption and reactionary system wide stretching….its really messing with me. I think it's fatigue. Like so many, I'm desperate for this season to be...done. And yet….we are far from done. And like everyone I know, I both fear and understand this reality. And so... we all keep breathing and we all keep gurting and we all keep digging and we all keep making gallon after gallon of refreshing (?) lemonade. And in time my adult problem solving semi-smart mostly glass is halfway full solution minded thinking kicks in and I reflectivity think through the last six months and I can identify big significant growth. Lots of meaningful needed change is occurring. Lots of unpacking, and pitching and repairing thinking and doing patterns. Without question a series of inspiring innovations have emerged across all industries. All of this good born inside all of this hardship. And every damned day I spend a shocking amount of time rubbing my forehead wondering what is actually happening?
I'm confident we are neck deep in an entirely new cycle of human development. It's the individual and yet collective change, action and reaction on a global scale all emerging in real time...inside of me and inside of you and inside of us. It's the interconnected-ness. I'm confident that a handful of professional Think Tanks full of super smart big brained researchers are gathering data about this global and yet very personal process and in time we will all have a body of thought provoking research and a fancy name for this 2020 funk. I've watched this unprecedented process cycle through my team, through my family, through my neighbors and through our city as a whole. It's seems seismic and it feels personal all at the same time. This phase...this process...its...powerful and potentially polarizing and yet somehow productive and strangely promising, right? And so….as I sift and sort and solidify and steady my heart and head...I faithfully return to gratitude.
Today, inside all of this I am forever grateful for the sweetness of our new Sabbath morning routine. Just one example of so much good naturally occurring inside so much chaos. Our sleepy, yet wide eyed girl, wakes early and wisphers, "Good morning Mama. Let's go downstairs and play." Similarly dressed in night shirts and high ponies, we make our way downstairs to grab some quick breakfast items, a few storybooks, a box of quickly gathered art supplies, my journal and laptop, our freshly filled water bottles and we quietly slip out the backdoor for a lazy morning on our patio. We snuggle. We read. We nibble. We talk. We laugh. We cuddle more. We slowly and carefully and simply share in a cool morning and begin the day together. Just me and our girl for a good long while. Burke eventually joins us and this is our new normal. Week after week a new sacred pattern and practices has been forged in our family…because of the endless changes of 2020 that are melting my brain on the regular. This would not have occurred before now...and as mixed up and ragged and exposed as I feel...I can't love this newness more. Eventually, SK and I find our way to our patio table and we paint and draw and my heart explodes and we laugh and I am filled with endless gratitude for this time and space and newness. To savor being her mama and watching her grow and responding to her early morning invite to simply and sweetly join her to play. Are you kidding me? Eventually, we go inside. We shower. We putter around the house. We worship in our home with song and prayer and sacrament and this is our new Sabbath. The afternoons and evenings are full of baking and cooking or lazily exploring nature or safety and wisely connecting with family and friends. It's a whole new level of perfect inside this paradoxical time. I'm equal parts messed up and miraculously healed by all of this change and difference. I'm desperately wanting to return to what we knew and desperately determined to hold on to all of the goodness and grace that 2020 has born. And so gratitude...and writing these silly essays…it is for me the beginning and the middle and the end.
Grateful for all of it. Grateful for today's version of hard and holy. Grateful for this new precious time to connect with myself and with my people and in doing so with the Divine. Grateful and grieving for what has been lost and deeply grateful for all that has been generously found. And tonight...hopeful that in time this sacred sifting and cycling will all make more lasting sense in the end.
