Living Through Limbo

Today feels like everyone’s holding their breath. We’re in one of those floaty limbos of the unknown. This time we’re together, but we all go through them at other times alone or in smaller groups. One of those times when you do what you can. And then you wait. It can be incredibly stressful, especially when our minds are capable of generating so many possible futures.

What to do in the meantime? There’s no magic solution. There will be times when the emotions burst through whatever coping strategies we try. At that point, it’s a matter of breathing while the wave washes over until it eases a little. (It will ease a little, at least for a moment. Pain comes in waves.)

I’ve been riding through my own waves. Here are some of the things that have helped me in between them.

Having a visible effect on the world, however small. This weekend, this took the form of a massive cooking and baking spree. It kept my hands and mind busy, filled my fridge with easy meals for future stressful days, and gave me a sense of being able to make change somewhere. (At least in my kitchen.) I also did some tidying and cleaning that had quick and satisfying results.

Trying something new. Being from an area that doesn’t grow a lot of apples, I had no idea what boiled cider was. But a tempting cookie recipe showed up in my email that used it (thanks King Arthur Baking!). So off I went on a deep dive into a project, filling the room with a bright apple fragrance and fascinating me with the alchemy of reducing a jug of apple cider to something more like honey. This is a long process. Results: delicious.

Changing my media inputs. Don’t get me wrong, I do keep up with the news. But I can’t consume news for hours and hours. In between, I’ve been listening to actual radio stations and rediscovering how much music can soothe me. There’s also something to knowing there’s a human being out there playing these songs in real time. Feels like gentle company. (I’ve been using the TuneIn radio app and listening to co-op and public radio music stations that don’t have ads, like KOOP and KUTX in Austin, TX, and KXT in Dallas. You can also listen on many radio station websites.)

I’ve also been playing with the Libby library app on my tablet to read magazines. Magazines take less concentration than books, have lots of pictures to look at, and give me a bit of the same feeling I get from scrolling social media. Since the library magazines are free, I can easily leaf through as many as I like on whatever topics catch my eye. There’s apparently a magazine for just about anything these days!

Remembering it’s okay to not be okay. You don’t have to be perfect, and you really don’t have to be perfect right now. Everything is a lot right now (and has been for a while). We’ll muddle our way through, one wave at a time.

Onward Through the Fog

Onward Through the Fog

On the second Wednesday of every month, I leave the house earlier than I’d like to and nervously drive farther than I’m comfortable to spend twenty dollars and five hours not talking to anyone. It’s a monthly silent writing retreat. Both my time there and the soup someone always volunteers to make are delicious. I sit in a big house on the top of a hill, greeted by deer, and write at a round kitchen table in front of a window, much like my own round kitchen table in front of a window. 

Today this window displays a world softened by cottony fog. On my way here, the fog was so dense that only a few hundred feet of the road were revealed to me at any given moment. Familiar landmarks vanished behind the curtain, while others, previously unnoticed, shone brighter.

Driving along, the words of one of my teachers came to mind. She speaks of how our unique path is revealed to us only moment by moment, small step by small step, illuminated by the lantern of our hearts. We only know what we know at that time and place. The future sits unseen, perhaps even unbuilt.

I struggle with this, as I struggle with fog. I like to see the horizon way off in the distance. My eyes, raised on the plains of North Texas, are calibrated for distance. Mountains and valleys invoke claustrophobia.  

My mind wants options. It wants to plan ahead. My copies of the Choose Your Own Adventure books were worn and bent from my constant flipping back and forth, pudgy child fingers holding my place, weighing the possibilities to find the best one. I wouldn’t just look one step ahead­—no, that wasn’t reassurance enough. I would examine the story two, three, four choicepoints at a time to find the longest story possible with the happiest outcome.

I have since outgrown those paperbacks, and my fingers are longer now, but that tendency to want to plan for all contingencies has not budged. My mind runs dress rehearsals and drills. Creates worst-case scenarios, then responses to those scenarios, and then responses to those responses.

Sometimes my mind’s predictions are true. Or something else happens that I didn’t anticipate. The phone call that makes my stomach drop and the room tilt 180 degrees. The moments when something is forever altered. The house was solid; now it sits open to the sky. The job was permanent; the meeting that just ended says it’s gone. The warm hand we hold grows cold. 

Fog reminds me of those moments when I can no longer pretend that I have a grasp on anything. It’s like the time once a year when I follow a line of people into a darkened forest, nearly blind due to my poor night vision, unable to predict when the ground beneath my feet is rising or falling. Every year, I want to stop. Every year, I tell myself the only way out is through, that this is the practice, that this is what is always happening anyway.

It always is. I can pretend all I want that I know where my next step will land. I can pretend that what I write in my planner for next week will happen. I can schedule and outline everything. Lay out my clothes the night before. Say, “I’ll see you Wednesday.” It’s all as make-believe as my child self pretending the living-room furniture came to life at night.

So it’s onward through the fog. Working to embrace the stumbling, to loosen my grip on the idea that my mind’s feeble plans have any real power in the face of the immensity of nature, of the flow of life itself.  Moving with faith towards something unseen? That’s the true adventure. And I choose that. (Now if I could just sneak a quick peek at the itinerary…?)