Fair-weathered Friend

As a child I spent a lot of time outside. I suppose parents in the 70’s needed their space. They had figured out that a little fresh air would not only tire us but it would allow them time to recuperate before we barged back in on their bliss.

I remember tumbling out into the yard to see who had arrived to play. You see, the weather was merely a playmate and brought along her special toys. She was sometimes the brooding child who pouted, stormed, and sobbed but who brought along puddles and sidewalk worms. She was sometimes the bright and shiny child who kept you out of breath and sweaty as she beckoned you with her tall grass, wildflowers, and leafy trees. She was sometimes the wicked child who pinched your cheeks but who you forgave because she brought along giant mold-able mounds of snow. She was an ever changing companion who added a special something to your fantastic games.

We didn’t wish the weather away we embraced it. In the sunshine we squinted into the sun and let it kiss our skin. We laughed while we blistered and then lazed under the shade of a tree when our skin was too tender to take more rays. We let water run over our boots and down our necks and into our shirts. We gulped at the wind and ate the gusts filling our lungs and snorting out dragon puffs of air through our noses. We wondered at a snowflake on our mitts and the glint of light as it caught a crystal in snowbank. We knew weather as a best friend and let her into our lives as she was.

Sometimes you noticed the weather when it came up beside you. There was a breeze before the clouds moved in that ran alongside you and whispered wet nothings into your ear. You could feel its humid breath and you didn’t know why but you no longer felt like biking further from home. You turned around and raced the wind back to your yard. The wind didn’t yet mess your neatly coiffed hair or spoil your freshly raked leaves. It was a rival to be raced and a co-conspirator of secrets.

 
In winter you stuffed yourself into your snow clothes and lulled around like a stiff legged zombies. Your knees just couldn’t bend with all the extra fabric and the weight of your over-sized boots made you shuffle like the walking dead. But you could fall exhausted into the open arms of a snowbank and lie there eating snowflakes falling from the sky or suck ice balls off your woolen mitts. Cold wasn’t cursed yet, it was just a different playmate - one that let you fashion tangible representations of your imagination into forts and friends. There was never enough time to build everything you thought of in the time you could knead and pat together the snow between pee breaks and short days. 

You didn’t yet curse autumn as the harbinger of winter to come. Fall was a pungent, ripe, and spicy child whose freckles and wild tantrums made you laugh and romp in the leaves. She had a kind of perfume that still makes me think of maple trees, first frosts, and pumpkin pie. It felt so good to slip a sweatshirt on over your over-tanned skin and snuggle into bed on the crisper evenings. We still swam in the lake but the cooler air would cause you to run for a towel or quickly dive back down into the soupy warm water for another underwater dip. The seeding flowers were our wishes to the world, dried bouquets for imaginary weddings, and batons for our long parades. 

Rain was another friend altogether. She beckoned us to come out and feel her oily slickness wash our arms and legs. We let her thunder rumble in our chests faces turned to the sky and then we turned and played in the puddles and rivulets she left for us. Rubber boots, splash suits, swimsuits, and bare feet. She didn’t care how you showed up. She showered you with her sweet nectar just the same. The beads of her love dripping from the wet strands of your bangs or off the rim of your hood. She’d find a way to send shivery fingers into those cozy places.

Weather wasn’t a forecast on the news we scorned. She was just a playmate that showed up that day - sometimes the warm and cozy girl next door, and sometimes the breathless and raging girl who never let you rest. Whoever you stepped out onto the doorstep to find, you welcomed. You just clasped their hand and skipped off on an adventure together. 

Then somewhere in the miniskirts and heels or the too-cool high tops and jean jackets we began to shun her. We refused to adjust to her whims and wanted her to adjust to ours. We sneered at her wintery winds and pouted at her blue clouds. We created separation between us and her and drove our friendship apart. 

But I wonder if we still had knitted scarves our grandmothers made out of our favorite colours or brightly painted rubber boots would we romp with her more joyfully? When we are hiking or camping we can feel her familiar presence and a piece of her friendship seeps back into our souls. She comes alongside us and whispers into our ears again. This is why we feel nostalgic around a campfire and at peace alone in the woods. We are with a long lost friend and are laughing again at her childish fancies.
 

365 Things and Abundance

My family has committed to letting go of one thing every day in 2017. That’s 365 things. 365 articles that we will be donating, selling, or disposing of. That’s a lot of things. And yet it does not feel daunting to let go of that many items by doing it a little at a time. 

Abundance

Already we are coming face to face with our abundance. When I look just in my kitchen cupboards I can count hundreds of items. When I include my clothes and garage, basement and storage closet, the number of possessions is astounding. We are truly blessed. We have enough items to have choice. We have enough tools and utensils to have specialized gadgets. We have colour, variety, and texture. But we do not NEED all of that.

In coming face to face with our abundance we also come face to face with our complexity. Stuff takes organization and space and cleaning and planning. Less stuff means less things to manage. And less stuff results in simplicity and space. I crave more simplicity.

Simplicity is part of the reason I enjoy camping and long road trips in our van. We have simple tools, simple food, simple clothes, and simple choices. We make do. We make up. We create. In our most simple lifestyle we have even greater abundance than in our overly stuffed house. 

Space

Many organizing books have been written about how you can strip away your possessions until the only things you are surrounded with are things that bring you joy. But what if it wasn’t the remaining items that bring you joy but instead the space around them - to truly see them - that makes them beautiful? A single antique teacup contains a measure of beauty greater than a china cabinet filled with them. Does it not? Is it the space that allows for appreciation? An art gallery meticulously plans the number of pieces of art to allow the viewer the space needed to take in each piece. If the gallery is too full, the viewer is overwhelmed and unable to enjoy any of the art.

As my family sheds the layers of years of accumulation, we are sifting through what is important to us, and digging deeper into what it means to have enough. I am already anticipating that we might need to do the same thing again in 2018. We are craving the awareness of what really brings us joy, the space and time to reveal in it, and the lightness of a life simplified.

Suggestions

If you are also wanting to do this, here are some of the things that are working for us:

• We printed a simple list style calendar so we can write down the things we are letting go of. Not to keep an inventory but to allow us to gather up 7 things on the weekend and make sure we allocated something to each day.

• We do it on weekends instead of one thing every day. It actually takes a few minutes to “see” the items we own and to get into the mindset of release. It is faster to gather 7 things once into that mindset than it would be to have to get into that mindset every day.

• We have a large bin in our hallway to put the things we are letting go of. It is not so that we can look at them and take them back, but to remind us that we are doing this so we keep up the momentum. We then box up the items that are for donation when there are enough. We also post a few items at once for sale instead of one at a time. 

• We are not concentrating on any one area of the house. We simply wander through the house and open cupboards, closets, and drawers. When we see something we do not want or need, we grab it. It would be more overwhelming to me to have to sort through a single drawer and not only part with 7 items but also organize it. I am allowing the organization to happen as the number of items slowly diminishes.

We are one month in and already we are experiencing a different relationship to our things, discussing “stuff” and what it means to us, and feeling excited about the space we are creating.

I will be writing more about this journey over the year reach out by email if you are going to join me. I’d love to hear your revelations too!

Check out these updates: 365 Things and Music, 365 Things - A Slow Trip to Less

In the End There is Only You

In the end, there is only you.  

I am sure that doesn’t seem like much of a lesson.  In fact, it seems sort of self-centered.  But let me explain.

In 2001, I was opening a Sears store in North Bay.  I was one of four managers (along with our store manager) whisked along in the stress and mess of staffing and merchandising a brand new store.  September 20th was the Grand Opening date.  We were 9 days away from the Grand Opening when 9/11 happened.  If you’ve ever worked retail and opened a store, you can just imagine the state of that building. There were no phone lines, no TV’s, heck in places there were no floors or walls!  It was utter chaos (it always seems to come together in the last 24 hours) but we were in no condition to open at that point. And we were in our own little bubble of concerns.

Someone from our store, probably out grabbing some food on their coffee break, happened to walk by the Sony store down the mall (thank you Sony for having TV’s). They saw the news reports and came back to the store to let us know what happened. We all had to go and watch the news together to overcome our disbelief. 

North Bay, Ontario is a little town but it has a military presence with NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and a military base nearby.  Many of my staff were wives of soldiers and in those first few days after 9/11 there was a lot of concern that they would be required to go to war.  We continued to open the store, but I had to set up emergency phone lines to allow these wives quick access to their spouses, should the situation change.  That sentiment of fear, anticipation of their men leaving them, and a sense of innocence lost and along with it trust in humanity, rubbed off on everyone.

I can remember very clearly sitting in my living room staring out the window wondering if my husband would be called to serve too.  Now we don’t have conscription in Canada so the chances of him being enlisted were slim. But when your world gets rocked as heavily as all of ours had during 9/11 you are never quite sure of anything anymore.  I had a 6 year old at that time too.  So there I sat wondering what might happen and fearing the world my little boy would be brought up in.  Would he even have a chance to grow up?  And then I looked at the sky and trees and listened to the birds sing.  

You know the birds didn’t even stop to ponder the plight of the humans!  They were busy getting on with their lives, digging worms, singing for their territories, and flitting from tree to tree.  The trees and sky didn’t seem to care either.  The trees swayed gently in the breeze and the sky stretched out in the morning light to welcome the day.  And I sat in thought.  I had the largest emptiest spot in my gut where my confidence should have been.  What if I was going to have to raise my son alone?  What if I had to endure loss after loss in life during a war?  What if I wasn’t able to provide a safe world for my son to grow up in?  What then?  And the sun kept shining, and the birds kept singing.  And then the peace came.  

The peace was the knowledge that I had everything I needed right now, right here, exactly as things were.  I had me.  Even if I suffered unspeakable pain, even if things were terrible for the world and my family, I had a constant companion through it all. I looked up at the sky and the tops of the trees and imagined that if I were to die right there, I would still have had everything because I had me.

I didn’t die - obviously - but I imagined that as you are dying that it will not matter who is sitting at your bedside. It will not matter if someone is holding your hand or not.  In those last moments on earth you will be reflecting deeply with yourself.  

You will be asking yourself what it was like to live and if you lived a good life.  You won’t be answering questions other people ask you.  You won’t be worrying about whether you made them happy in your actions.  You will be wrestling with your own expectations.  Did you do everything you wanted to?  Were you true to yourself? Did you live up to your purpose?  Did you learn and love and listen to your heart?  In the end, when you are dying, you are alone with you.  Only you.  

It took the tragedy of 9/11 and the shift in my world from certainty to uncertainty for me to come face to face with myself.  I realized I had better get really good at being with me throughout the rest of my life, because in the end there is only you.