Some days

on letting go and holding on

When you cannot write, think.
When you cannot think, walk.
When you cannot walk, rest.
When you cannot rest, love.
When you cannot love, look.
Look.
Look — closer.
There is always love.

bm.

My laptop is littered with half-finished posts, with random scraps of ideas tossed into unnamed Word docs, with proof of how scattered my brain is.

It feels like a beehive kicked; a bottle of soda water shaken. So much energy inside that has nowhere to go. Fragments of thoughts and ideas and solutions and questions and fears and regrets and what-ifs and if-onlys fizzing around my mind, hoping for an outlet, searching for some way to be satisfied.

I can’t think straight. Can’t manage a full thought. I don’t know if it’s a health thing, a hormonal thing, a living in the world thing, an overwhelm thing, a too much coffee thing, a not enough coffee thing, a mother thing, a human thing…

It’s not just me, is it?

I swing from anger to guilt to shame to fear to gratitude to love to restless to hopeless to optimism to scepticism only to land in the middle, shoulders bunched, palms raised skyward, waiting for someone to tell me what to do. How to move forward. How to take this one wild and precious life and make it count for something. (Because as much as I love those words, some days they feel like heaping tonnes of beautiful pressure — do more, be more, live more.)

Maybe it is just me. But if not, no wonder we’re so tired.

On days like this (and I remind myself it is not all days, only some) I try to shift my attention away from the noise in my head. I shift it towards simple actions. Towards noticing tiny details. Towards putting something good — no matter how small — into the world, making it better than it was.

Today, I walked outside, I watered my dahlias and sat in the sun. I transplanted a couple of tomato seedlings in the hope of getting a few handfuls of red gems this summer. I pressed my nose into the dirt-covered heads of garlic I pulled from the soil yesterday. I lay on my belly on the damp grass and tried to feel the earth breathing underneath me. I went inside.

I felt the noise build again and I allowed it. I paired it with small actions. Folded the laundry. Cooked dinner. Jotted down a few lines of work when they appeared in my head. Ticked tiny items off my to-do list: Call this person. Sign up for that thing. Respond to their email.

None of if calmed me, but it did propel me. And in the end, it added up to a day. Not a Wonderful Day. Not a Terrible Day. But a day, nonetheless.

Sometimes, that’s enough.

Sending you love and care,
Brooke xx