Twinkle

She strategically places timbers around newspaper and a pile of sticks and branches our little boys transport in a small red wagon from the woods to the clearing.  With a match she sets the kindling ablaze and settles in, furiously waving a makeshift bellows she crafts from the cardboard box recently emptied of cans of soda, or some sort of imbibing adult beverage. She’s called the President because no one does this better than she does:  I have learned everything I know about building and maintaining a campfire from her.

   

Sometimes little effort is needed to grow a tiny flame into a steady, crackling blaze. Other times painstaking patience and earnest tenderness are required for flickering sparks to catch and finally roar. 

She’s invited countless new friends to join this warm circle around her fires.  These flames have witnessed the gamut of emotions:  Raucous laughter, shameful admissions, fierce debates, bitter regret, hopeful promise and wild celebration. If they could talk they would surely tell the stories of joy and pain, fears and dreams, aches and desires both sated and starved.

Light fascinates me with its determination and deference, its positivity and promise.  Gleam, Efficacy and Trove are past year-end ponderings I’ve posted about glittering, sparkling, glorious light. My favorite message this year, by a landslide, comes from Krista Tippett’s “Becoming Wise”. She connects a plethora of fascinating interviews into a collective wisdom for our time, and maybe for all time, including the recounting of Rachel Naomi Remen’s take on “Birthday of the World”, a Jewish teaching about repairing the human condition. It’s the story of how a giant ray of light creates the world, and soon after, an accident breaks this light into countless sparks that bury themselves inside every person on the planet. It’s our responsibility as humans to uncover this hidden light in others and bring the world back together again.

I read this section of the book over and over; it is a lodestone for me.  This is a message I’m compelled to spread, and my Christmas card is the vehicle. I love that while this story’s roots are Jewish its meaning is religion agnostic. It speaks to the power we have as individuals.  It is proof, yet again, we are enough to change the world if we each do our part. I am willing to bet this light buried within us is the powerful gift, unique to each of us, that when unlocked and released fulfills our purpose.  Many of us spend a lifetime searching for this.  What if those around us chose to listen, to question, to seek to understand us, and in doing so helped us find and release our light? 

I want to say now, more than ever, this message is needed and should be heeded.  But instead I have to believe each generation’s storytellers have felt this just as strongly as I do in this moment.

   

It is hard work, striving to listen for common ground, seeking the light I know is inside every individual I encounter. It requires extraordinary self-control to tamp down my own opinions, especially when I’m cleaved to them so completely, and make room for another to unleash his equally passionate beliefs.

The light within us, like the light of the campfire, is ever-changing.  Maybe this is what makes us so complexly compelling and wonderfully sparkling as humans. At times we flicker nervously, struggling to survive in challenging conditions; other times we are a stoic, steady burn.  We can soar to spitting and crackling heights, and die down to smoldering embers.  Sometimes we’re certain even the glint is gone, only to be surprised when the wind kicks up igniting us back to life.  We all have a spark inside, this I know for sure.  The question is how do we find the courage to raise our voices, to put ourselves out there, own who we are and what we’re about, and allow those around us to help stoke that tiny flame into a brilliant blaze?  As I reflect on what I want to be different in my life in the coming year, answering that question becomes paramount, for this is where it becomes obvious we are enough.

Believe that light inside of you is bright enough. 

The light of the world breaks open,

Buries fragments within us all.

When we choose to discover,

This light in each other,

We heal the world,

We answer our call.

Relinquish

She’s cited this research many times, my former weekend running partner, the woman in lockstep with me all 13.1 miles of my one and only half-marathon:  It doesn’t matter whether we walk or run, it’s the miles we cover that keep us healthy and fit, not how fast we cover them.

Every time I see her she tells me the same thing. She’s a clinical massage therapist, trained to unfurl and smooth out the muscles we stiffen and shorten in the name of physical fitness:  The best exercise for our bodies is to stretch for 20 minutes daily.

 

By my rough calculations of classes attended, I’m pretty certain I’ve heard this no less than 300 times; it’s the mantra each instructor repeats verbatim in the opening posture of the Bikram Yoga series: “Breathe as much as possible, as long as possible, as slow as possible.” 

I know they’re right. I’ve realized the benefits of being kind to my body, heeding the warnings my knee began to whisper eight years into constant running. And yet there’s a part of me still wincing in guilt and shame as I admit I’ve quit because I needed to dial it down a few notches.

It’s not just the way I look at exercise.  It’s the way I look at life:  The growth strategies I’m plotting for my clients, the search my boys are on for the right pair of wings. While I know it all takes time, I can’t help but feel like I should be moving things along faster. I can’t seem to accept that slower is better, that less is actually more.

 “Where has the year gone?” we ask in puzzled amazement.  We’re here, on the brink of New Year’s Day, and can’t understand what happened to the last 12 months.  It seems a little ironic to be so surprised time moves quickly when we spend so much of our time with the accelerator pressed to the floor.

 

We are conditioned to attack life with speed and intensity.  We want to graduate early, win all our races, ascend up the corporate ladder on jet packs, we want our relationships to zoom into commitments, our families to grow on demand.  The ticking of a biological clock is deafening. The knell of the grave is terrifying.  What if we die before we’ve completed the bucket list?

I wonder if life gives the appearance of moving so fast because we’re so unwilling to accept a slowdown.  Is it a vicious cycle?  If we stopped trying to cram so much in, stopped trying to be so many things to so many people, if we stopped intervening in the name of moving life along, would we actually feel like life moves itself along at a more reasonable pace?

 

What if, instead of shaking down the tree of life for all the fruit we can knock loose, we could learn to rest and reflect in the shade of its branches until the fruit falls on its own?

In 2017 I want to become comfortable with slowing down, with giving life the time it needs to reveal all it has in store for us. Ultimately it means giving up this illusion of control I think I have over the universe, and calling a truce on what I know to be true:   Slower is better.