Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Ocean breeze

I cannot tell you how it started but I can tell you why it started. You might recall that at the beginning of 2022, I had no resolutions except to live a full life. I will tell you now, that did not happen in 2022. After my father walked from this life into the next in March of 2022, I felt like someone turned the lights off. So, as you might expect, everything went wrong but in December of 2022, everything became right again by design.

In 2020 when my person and I did Christmas and New Year’s separately, we agreed to never do that again. In keeping with that commitment, we spent the holidays with his family in 2021, and in 2022, we went on vacation to Cancun and Belize City. While I loved Mexico, Belize City has my heart. That holiday was special not just because of the great cocktails, New Year’s party, or the excellent ceviche, but more because it was the rest I desperately needed.

A few weeks before that holiday, I had one of the worst seasons of my career. I remember feeling less than enough, hopeless like I had found rock bottom’s basement (again) and there was no redemption. I got on the phone with an old friend who sent me an excerpt on failure from Jay Shetty’s Think Like a Monk. I will not detail it out but I bought the book within the week and read it before I got on that flight from BWI. It reminded me of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. It reminded me that we emphasize the things that we can live without, at the expense of what we can’t live without and this is WHY it started.

Have you ever had a conversation with your fears? I have. 2022 was such a dark time, I had fought and fought and in the end, I resolved that conversation was the only way to get through and in one of those conversations, I thought carefully about what it might mean if my fears came through. I realised, I would live and for me, that was enough.

The psalmist says “The Fool says there is no God”. I think the psalmist is right because, in that conversation with my fears, Yahweh called me to something deeper, greater – Faith and a deep sense of freedom. Can you imagine, living your life not just with the luxury of freedom but the understanding of choice and making the choices that fill your life? I can because that is what 2023 has been so far. I exhaled by the end of 2022 and it became clear that I cannot live in fear of loss or in pursuit of the world’s definition of success. I no longer go to bed without counting my blessings (literally thinking about all the things that went well during the day) because I am forcing myself to celebrate everything every chance I get. The night is a strange time, it beckons for reflection on the day but often forces us to anchor on the things that did not go well – I now refuse to do that. I also started reading more fiction and joined a book club. I even signed up for a dance class (I have not been) but I was really committed to going. You see the thing is, this year, I have been deliberate about protecting (by the grace of God), the thing that matters to me – Peace. Yahweh gave me peace that passes understanding and I cannot describe it (in part because it is inexplicable and in part, because I am writing while drinking tequila from a wine glass).