Handle with care
On complexity, studying for life, and the dance of connection
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Today is the last of five days of daily writing and publishing. If you enjoyed these, please let me know by giving this post a heart or sharing it with a friend!
After this, it’s back to a more usual format of Regarding Dew letters. Thank you for witnessing me in this process and for coming along on the ride.
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I didn’t plan to write this (‘this’ being what I haven’t yet written). I didn’t plan to write and publish my writing for five days in a row, that is, until I planned to do it on a whim.
I trusted the impulse to trust an impulse. To hit reset and begin again. To get friendly with consistency and forgetting and returning. To show up without expectation. To get uncomfortable. To practice patience—god, patience.
In a group call a couple years ago, someone said something about difficulty that struck me. It was so simple and it struck me like the intense final note of a symphony. It might not read the same as it landed in the moment, but it’s something to take into your day. She said:
This is simply Life expressing itself. And sometimes it’s ugly.
Well.
The first sentence is a summation of radical acceptance. It’s not about complacency or passivity, it’s just a moment of honesty that we give a million and three judgements and categorizations to Life expressing itself. And Life is simply expressing itself through coming into and out of form, in patterns and sensations and cycles.
And sometimes it’s ugly. Ok, that’s a judgement. But in the same way that it can be freeing to practice witnessing beyond labels and concepts, it can be freeing to name our experiences without padding. I really don’t like using cultural buzzwords in my writing, but in this case it makes sense: her short expression felt like an antidote to “spiritual bypassing” or “toxic positivity”. Life is beautiful and it’s ugly, sometimes in the same day and hour and moment. It can be both of those things and far beyond anything that either of those words can possibly touch. This is simply Life expressing itself.