The last week has been full of new. The kids went back to school and that changed how our peaceful, slow morning starts look.
Instead of waking up, doing morning minutes outside and meditating, writing this email/blog post and then walking and having breakfast, I now get up before the sun to wake my oldest son for school and then begin the caravan of transporting kids to school.
And new is often VERY hard for me.
I do love some variety, but this variety I find in the changing of seasons or small details in the familiar.
I have one place that I love to walk everyday and it is the same so I notice what is different about it: more leaves on the ground, a slight change in color vibrancy, a hazy fog through the rays of sun. I like my morning minutes, quiet, with my same favorite mug but the thoughts and books change everyday.
I don't hate new.
I like newness cradled in the warm blanket that is the familiar.
I feel like Linus, in the Charlie Brown cartoons, braving the world, so long as he has his trusty blue blanket. I work with different people every day. I am learning new information every day.
My office is my blue blanket. My morning walk on the same paths is my blue blanket. The familiar stores, that I know the layout of, are my blue blanket.
I think sometimes this makes me difficult for my family who like variety. They want to go to the new restaurant, the new route with different scenery, the new foods.
I'm still learning how to navigate this. After walking the slippery slope line of ignoring my preferences for so very long, I feel I have become less willing to compromise. Less willing to throw my nervous system into a raw state. Less willing to say, "it's fine, let's do whatever you prefer." I lived that way for a long time, to the point that when I was in a season of life as a single mom, I had a really hard time naming any preferences that I had to create our home or our routines.
It was in that really hard season of newness that I began tossing out anchors. Walking to the lake we lived by every night. Sitting by the water and watching it change through every season, from my same spot on the stone to the left of the pier. It was my only anchor for a while. I filled our home with driftwood and anchors symbolically and when I thought about God and what he looked like to me in that season- all I could come up with was water.
For the first time in my 30 something years, at that point, God stopped feeling like the anchor and started feeling like the water. Even so- I went every day to stare at the water. To understand.
I have new anchors now and a different feeling of "out to sea". I'm finding what that compass needs to look like to navigate me to a place of balance between my anchors and flow. Today, I'm holding my anchors tight. Tomorrow, maybe I'll let myself float a bit more.
Warmly,
Jennifer Ferrante, CHt.
Ferrante Family Wellness
Comentarios