Good morning! Here I am showing up as promised! If you read to the end of yesterday’s post, you may have seen that I announced, in an effort to insert some control into this chaos that I am living in, that I am aiming to write, every day, for the next 30 days. My goal? To shift my perspective from sadness and frustration, to looking at life through different lenses, with the hope of seeking deeper meaning in the moments I have. I can’t promise everything I write will be good, but that’s part of it too. Loosening the reigns on my own creativity, worrying less about perfection, and more about depth and simple awareness. I mean, I’m starting this on a Friday…. the 28th day of August… typically I would wait for the 1st of the month or a Monday to start fresh and have a clean slate…. but no. 2020 is messy, it’s imperfect… and so am I….and so is this challenge.
I invite you to join me! Look for your own moments. Unlock your own creativity in whatever modality you wish. Maybe you vow to meditate every day. Maybe you try to see something different on your morning run. Maybe you find meaning in the back of a drawer as you work to de-clutter and organize. Maybe you dust off a canvas and paint for the first time in a while. Share your moments with me, with your friends. Use the hashtags #thegiftofmoments and/or #seekingmoments2020. And read my last post to understand this all more fully. But, either way, I’m ready. You ready? Here we go….
Footprints and Mind Games.
Whenever I come to the beach, I try to start my day with a morning run. The when is always in flux depending on how late we were up the night before, how well I slept, and what the weather is doing. Typically I go in the 8-11am pocket. This morning I was up a bit earlier and laced up in the 7 o’clock hour. Off I went and since I like to run past the sea wall and onto the bird sanctuary with the fishermen and the dogs on the north end of the island, I take the more northern of the two beach access paths by my parents’ home. Today, for some reason, I opted to take the southern one. They’re close together, but you can appreciate the jetty and it’s a few extra steps.
This morning, I happened to notice the footprints in the sand of a wide array of animal life. Birds, cats, dogs, rabbits, foxes, raccoons….baby turtles? What are these prints? As I reached the beach, they turned to prints of sea gulls, sand pipers and sand crabs. On a normal day, I would have kept walking, but with these different lenses on in the context of this challenge, I marveled at how unique they all were, how they twittered this way and that, and sometimes back around again. I reflected too, upon how these footprints are in the sand and had I come a bit later in the day, as is typical for me, I might not have had the opportunity to bear witness to the evidence of these night dwelling creatures who were dancing in the moonlight or finding (or avoiding being found as) a meal.
I haven’t been sleeping well this summer. So much chaos, and decisions being made that directly impact me and my family but are wholly out of my control. These footprints made me think of my own thoughts at night. Very often they go this way and that, and almost always go round and round and back again, just like some of these footprints are. They encounter different animals (thoughts) and shuffle and scurry and toward, against or compound one on top of the other. It made me think of the scene in Princess Bride when Prince Humperdink, in pursuit of his captured princess-to-be, he approaches the sandy spot at the top of The Cliffs of Insanity and he tracks the paths and choreography of the sword fight that took place between Wesley the Farm Boy and Inigo Montoya. Humperdink deduces the fencing styles and where and how the dance occurred and the paths of the victor and the loser. So too, in my brain sometimes, there is a prevailing thought storm, but it sometimes dances with other thoughts and recoils with new reflections or worries about how someone else feels or what they might be thinking and round and round we go until I either finally fall asleep or am forced to begin the day because night never came to my brain and no rest could be found.
These animals who left these footprints are nocturnal. They are meant to hunt and also avoid being prey….in darkness. They are biologically wired to be awake at night. The scurries and dashes and lollygagging paths they take in the sand are just right… for them.
For a mother of four who has a long list of to-do’s each day, I do not need to be dueling and flitting about with my runaway thoughts. As Emerson says, “finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” Now, today, is a new chance for observing and enjoying and controlling only a very small number of things which are mine to control…. pretty much: how often I run the laundry, how happy or cranky I choose to behave, and how awake and present and alive I can attempt to be. That’s about it. The rest? It’s on someone else. Or up to the universe, God, the powers that be. We are all entitled to carry what we wish. It’s okay to set some things down sometimes when they’re too heavy. Choose, instead, peace. I returned to that path an hour later, and the tracks were gone.
Happy seeking, friends! There is more for you to notice in your own lives, you just have to look through different lenses….and that is something you can control. ✨
Care to share your thoughts?