External and Internal Explorations

I’ve had a pretty active and social last couple of days. Sunday found me enjoying a walk to downtown Mill Valley to meet a friend that I’ve known since middle school. On the way, I passed a woman who was picking up trash on the roadside, when I thanked her for her efforts, she said it was her usual Sunday routine. What a cool idea. 

Daroonee and I had a delightful couple of hours catching up. It’s such a treat to spend time with her – she is such a supportive connector, listening to my tales of the last 8 months, offering career ideas and suggestions of people she can put me in touch with who could help during this time of exploration. She is an incredibly loving, hard-working person, who will do anything to help others. I feel lucky to have been her friend for so many years.

After we parted, I had a look at some of the art galleries downtown, then headed home. That night Mom and I watched the first half of the movie To Kill A Mockingbird, the movie was made even richer after having listened to the audiobook. 

On Monday, I had a wonderful time looking after Javi. After a quick stop at Sports Basement to get some new walking shoes (I had put many, many miles on my last pair), we played catch at the beach for a long time, then wandered up to the new Presidio Tunnel Tops park. It’s a fantastic space and the kids outpost playground is so cool! It was a very windy day, so by the time I got Javi back home we were pretty wiped out. 

I met Emmy in Concord on Tuesday, dropping my car off for a wheel alignment while we went for a hike at Fernandes Ranch. It was a cool, sunny day, and the hillside was a beautiful bright green. We got a good workout from the hike up the fire road and enjoyed the gorgeous views from the top, before taking the Woodland Trail back down through the trees. About four years ago I participated in a Vo-Cal work weekend where we created the Woodland Trail, which sadly has become quite overgrown and badly in need of maintenance. After our hike, Emmy treated me to a yummy lunch in her backyard as Winston dozed in the sun at our feet.

People are always asking me, with the best of intentions, what I’m doing, and how I’m spending my time. I want to answer truthfully and say ‘not much’, but that feels wrong and bad and lazy. The truth is part of me really wants to just be doing a lot of stuff and to feel productive, and to feel like I’m taking action to determine what’s next for me. But those things, if I do too many, lead me to feeling anxious and empty. When I take time to do things that don’t look like very much, like taking a long walk in silence, the peace and calmness and solidity I feel from that make me feel whole. Or spending time journaling or practicing Taiko, yoga and French send me in a positive direction.  I feel so much internal pressure to quantify my days and to be able to show people what I’m doing, how I’m achieving and get that gold star, pat on the head, ‘wow’ response. But that’s why I’m taking this time to go deep enough inside to figure out what it is I truly want and what’s important to me. I want to grow and not just accomplish a series of tasks that in the end don’t really mean anything and that I’m going to forget all about in a matter of days if not minutes. 

I’m hoping this internal work, this quiet, slow, inexplicable work will sustain me and help guide me, even though I have no idea how that will happen or what it’s going to lead to. But every time I do it, it just feels right and I feel like I’m becoming more myself. Sometimes it leads to insights or ideas that cause me to put things on my to-do list – the sort of things I want to do, not the ‘shoulds’. The shoulds, the shoulds, the shoulds – they have dominated my life for so long and they’re so exhausting because they’re never ending and as soon as I finish one thing I ‘should’ do, the next three shoulds have jumped on my shoulders and are yelling in my ears, and if I dare to sit down, they yell louder. But the funny thing is sometimes, if I just keep sitting there, they quiet down. They don’t necessarily go away, but they seem to get distracted or bored, and the stuff I should do doesn’t feel as urgent and life-threatening. 

It’s such a simple thing to rest in between actions, but it is so so hard to do. I worry that if I rest, I won’t be able to get up and do the next thing, and then I think, ‘If I’m that tired, maybe I shouldn’t be getting up and doing the next thing, maybe I should just be resting.’ It is exhausting going within and allowing what is there to surface. Most of the time I’m too scared to let that happen, but I’m trying, I’m learning about taking some time for contemplation, for silence, and to lay down all of those shoulds.