In the future lies the excitement of the possible mixed with the fear and anxiety of the unknown and what ifs. In the past lies the warm memories of that which came before, but with the anger and loss of what has been and can no longer be. And between the extremes of this pendulum lies the joy and grace of the now.
This year has been a physical manifestation of this pendulum. Embracing the beauty of all that is in the now, knowing I can not hold onto the past as I struggle to bring my mind back from the future and all that may be.
There was this moment in Vietnam that I keep “feeling” when I think of what this year has meant to me. Traverse and I were on bikes, the kids at the hotel working. It was scorching hot, just standing still resulted in rivers of sweat running down my back. We were in a new city, and the streets were packed, their normal state of chaotic movement. Traffic lights, signs and sidewalks are merely suggestions rarely followed by the motorbikes, cars, bicycles, water buffalo all moving along their own, completely unpredictable trajectories. As I biked, I felt like I was floating, a sense of weightlessness. I was not worried about the girls; they have their own wings now to fly. I did not fight or hate the heat, I just thought of it as a Norwegian sauna and breathed into it, finding cool from within. I let go of the fear of safety, as the risk-calculations had been done so many times this year, it was no longer done mentally, more felt instinctive. I knew my best protection was my ability to keep moving. The way to not get hit both here and in life is to move slowly, predictable in the direction I wanted to go. By doing so, one gains an extra power, like a force field, where the traffic then bends around you making a way forward where it once looked like an impassable wall of chaos. The road ahead was to be in the now.
And it is that simplicity, that breath into the now, that I treasure most from my time in Vietnam. As our flight took off, I felt the bond break between the wheels of the plane and the solid earth below. I embraced the power of less as the wings were lifted not by more but from the vacuum into the impossibility of flight. 13 years to the day after my sister left this world, I breathed into the fleeting sense of our time on this planet, and in this year with a renewed sense of wonder and awe of this life, we get to live. Knowing more by feeling than from thinking, that if we keep moving forward with our hearts full and minds clear in the joy of the now, we stay upright and the impossible suddenly bends into the possible.
