I admit it. The hippie-dippie crystal waving, vegan eating, millennial, meditation app culture grates on me.
And my mother is a yoga teacher. Chew on that.
I don’t understand why you need an app to help you meditate. You just need a place to sit quietly and breathe. To be calm and watch the water and avoid challenging your own thoughts. Yeah I know, easier said than done. And believe me, I’m the one who really needs to do it.
This season I found myself the subject of a country song:
“My car is in Florida, my dog is in Ohio, my cat is in Tampa, and I am in California.”
Every day, I got more and more discombobulated and untethered. It’s hard to feel centered when you’re literally being pushed and pulled in all different directions. Thanks, Hurricane Irma. And Jose. And Maria.
I was so stressed during the week of Hurricane Irma that I considered doing something crazy. If you had asked me four years ago, I would have told you that I’d rather spend my life in prison than move to Ohio to live in Cincinnati near my in-laws.
My in-laws are great, but they aren’t people who understand or care about boundaries. Show up at your door at 3 AM without calling? Sure. Walk in on you without knocking while you’re changing into your sports bra? Yep. Drive 19 hours and show up in Florida uninvited? Of course!
But after weeks of hurricanes, no power, canned foods, boredom, and several flights, I’d had quite enough, thank you. When I completely lost it in the Cincinnati airport Starbucks (not my proudest moment), I knew it was time to do something. Anything.
I needed to regain control of my life. That doesn’t mean the physicality of my life or my body but rather my mind. Everything else follows the mind. It took me years to learn this lesson. Like, no matter how many times I worked out or how hard I exercised, if I couldn’t control my obsessive mind when it came to eating and dieting, I would fail. And it was the same thing here.
I could choose to obsess over the hurricanes, watch them continuously on the news, and text my friends, “OMFG what are we going to do?” “Do you have power yet?” “No? WTF.” “How about you?”
We can keep complaining loudly and self-righteously “poor me, poor us.”
Or we can realize that we are very much in the one percent of the world with our power, food, and the ability to deal with this destruction.
And my mind needed to calm the heck down.
So I forced myself to sit in silence with a cup of my favorite tea, Hot Cinnamon Spice Sunset by Harney & Sons (no, I’m not being paid to advertise their product, it’s just delicious). I sipped on it and just considered the awe of the world and the strength of nature.
I’m not normally hippie-dippie, but I do have a spiritual side which tends to come out in the form of random poetry, both in my writing and reading. This season of tropical storms brought to mind William Blake’s poem, “Tyger Tyger,” about how man (and in this case, nature) are both perfectly beautiful and perfectly destructive. It’s actually the perfect metaphor for life.
Life is beautiful, destructive, and most importantly, short. Don’t forget to smell the flowers, kiss your kids, and realize that none of us are owed anything. As the saying goes, “The days are long, but the years are short.” And when you find yourself spiraling out of control, make sure to find a good book, a cup of tea or a glass of wine (I’m all for an occasional morning glass of wine), and a place where you can sit with yourself and look at the trees and squirrels. And just realize that – like my dad always said – everything looks better tomorrow.
