Some things carry an inherent, non-negotiable weight no one person has the right to redistribute. And the intersection of these two ideas: the preservation of what is and should remain inherent, and preventing their inequitable redistribution is where we shape our legacies.
Dignity. Worthiness. Accountability.
It’s inevitable that survival mentality stirs in our mammalian brains, self-protective and competitive. When these certain factors swirl within and around us, we default to other modes.
We punish those we’ve deemed a threat and act to tip the scales in our favor. We slip our actions inside of identities to justify them. We point to hand-selected references and authorities, claiming them as the authority, and we almost always presume to know more about what is right than those we are stealing from.
Among us, some will commit egregious, bold, intentional harm. And some are docile, even naive.
Most of us shuffle through, pursuing our best, stacked somewhere between extremes. It’s never as simple as we’d like to make it. Always reaching. Always contracting.
It’s dark right now in the Northern Hemisphere. The solstice is the landing before the rebound.
This is the time of year my father was drifting away from us one handful of laughter, tears and cells at a time, and I remember. Each calendar day, both sweetness and sorrow pour into a quiet smile that’s holding a non-negotiable weight.
An odd restlessness moves me in ways I don’t always understand. And the incongruence is so odd…in my warm house packed with many different kinds of love, I feel content even as tension pulls just below the surface.
We make sweet, but trite mantras in an effort to be mindful; to model the ways we hope to be. And then because we’ve made the graphics and shared them, we forget. Always onto the next one. We forget to stay.
Content or confused. Weary or light of heart. Shuffled. Maybe we’re riding something we can’t place into words, so we stay preoccupied with our failings, yearnings and the metronomic unfolding of our ordinary, mediocre, problem-riddled, and very best lives. We forget to love unabashedly. We forget to receive love when it comes knocking in its many forms.
As the darkness slowly returns to light, we are so thirsty for it. I can’t imagine life without these feelings of quiet solitude and bravely stretching toward anything soft, warm and comforting. Each year we are older and there is no joy in restriction.
What a time to learn. To be alive. How we brush against one another when we have no choice but to be honest…
What are you learning about yourself?
Photo by Jill Dimond on Unsplash
