seedlings | not but, and.
Some current thought fragments in a list of ten. Making order out of chaos but it's still sort of chaos.
1. I like lists. I like writing in list format, parsing my thoughts out in small doses. It helps me focus. It helps me sort. Giving them some semblance of order, regardless of how nonlinear the subject matter actually ends up within the structure. I like the ironic way that sometimes the nonsequitur-ness of it ends up sort of slotting connections into place unexpectedly. I like the process of being surprised by my own process.
2. Something I have been thinking about lately: Life is messy, and it is beautiful. Not but. And.
Two things can (and almost always are) true at once. There’s something here about learning how to expand our capacity for holding contradictions without turning them into limitations. There’s always a way for the multiplicity of our lives to harmonize.
3. Sometimes a sense of shame crops up about certain aspects of where I have landed in life for the moment. The reframe I work with is this: I have cultivated beauty, love, connection. I have made and am making the best of a life that was given to me. No, it's not perfect. It's better than perfect. It's real. It's deep and it's wide. It's expansive and vast. It's rich and fulfilling and heart-centered and interesting. In each and every chapter I have discovered an opportunity to keep learning and growing and evolving. And I continue to choose to see these opportunities around every corner.
I would be proud of anyone I know for doing all of this. And so I practice being proud of myself for doing it. I practice refusing to feel ashamed for showing up, for learning, for experiencing. For doing exactly what we all came here to do.
4. "Shame is a destroyer. Let's destroy the destroyer by loving who we are." —Jeff Warren
5. “Reckon with the unknown. Find excitement in the idea that there will always be more for you to learn rather than harboring shame over it.”
6. The world is a rich, constantly shifting blend of concepts and perceptions and possibilities, and part of the point of being here in it is to say yes to the experiences that we are given.
7. Befriending uncertainty, again and again. Seeing the unknown as something exciting rather than something terrifying. Choosing this as a lens, a worldview, because it takes me farther than the fear does.
8. Rerouting: Go into the stillness, and choose again.
9. If you want kinder love, tell kinder stories.
10. "We are each other's harvest. We are each other's business. We are each other's magnitude and bond." —Gwendolyn Brooks
"The end was years ago / but the debris lived in the present"--your phrasing speaks to me in such a deep way, friend.
And THIS: "I like the ironic way that sometimes the nonsequitur-ness of it ends up sort of slotting connections into place unexpectedly. I like the process of being surprised by my own process."
And: "Two things can (and almost always are) true at once." I think about it a lot--how we so often hold contradictory things in tension... things that feel like they shouldn't be able to co-exist (but they do) in us.
And: The entirety of Point 7 rings in my heart.
Thank you. Again and again.