I wonder how many of you were thinking, while you were reading the last bit of writing that I posted on here, “Yeah, you’re on vacation. Of course you can recognize the ups and downs and stay calmer about it. Wait until you get home, dumbass!”. That was some good insight to all of you who were thinking that.
Being able to feel those ups and downs and being able to keep some perspective and stay calmer is definitely harder the more that we have going on, but it was still working for the first few days back from vacation. And there were waves on those first few days. But eventually I did get worn out by the consistency of the waves. On vacation, I didn’t have the stress and demands of work and only had kid stuff and the random annoyances that pop up to deal with. Back at home, it’s all of it all the time.
I started to get sea sick. It wasn’t just that there were almost constant waves, some of them were big waves. The waves on vacation hadn’t been that big. There was other weather too that made it difficult to navigate calmly. There was fog.
A few days ago I had a day off from work and it finally wasn’t raining. That should have been smoother sailing. But the day started out with a little squall. Then the fog started to roll in. One year ago was the day that a man, who I had never spoken to before, called me at work to tell me that my mother was dead. That didn’t cause any waves a year later but it still changed the weather. Then I had work drama (yes, I already told you it was my day off) and the waves started kicking up again. And there were winds blowing in from another direction bringing more waves. My father had been in a car accident and I couldn’t really hear all that he was saying on the voicemail he left but he wanted me to drive him around to a couple of places. I couldn’t be sure from the voicemail if the accident had happened that day or not but I thought that it probably had. I didn’t really want to stop my one day off, that I felt like I needed, to go get him and drive him around. That’s a bigger story than I’m going to fit in here, but there’s a lot of complications there and I didn’t really feel like I owed him that. I had plans to spend time with my kids. But it was still on my mind.
When I spoke to my father later, I found out that he had been in a car accident that day. Someone had turned in front of him at almost the last second and he didn’t even have a chance to hit the brakes. He could have died on the same day that I had found out a year before my mother had died. Bam. The clouds started to part and I could see clearer skies. It was just a shift in perspective. All those other waves that had been pushing me around all day seemed smaller when I had that “what if” to compare them to.
It is hard to see that the shit we’re dealing with in the moment is just the same old up and down. It’s especially hard because it’s often constant. There always seems to be something to deal with. Do you ever leave work and just think about how at home you’ll be able to hang with the kids and just not deal with any crap and then you get home and the kids are misbehaving and giving crazy attitude and your spouse is all burned out from dealing with them and you don’t get that break? You have to keep dealing with more.
Then it’s “woe is me” time. Why can’t I get a break? Why is there always something to be dealing with? It’s all about perspective. It’s easy to forget that we aren’t owed a break and that the ocean is never totally calm. There’s always motion. Finding out that instead of talking to my father on the phone, which in and of itself is uncomfortable and sometimes stressful, I could have been talking to another police officer, telling me that my other parent and last living close relative had died, opened up those storm clouds to let the clear skies in because it shifted my perspective.
This stuff takes practice. This is what it means to be mindful. When we are able to feel the up and downs, the constant motion as natural then we are there. We’ve got our sea legs. When we can step back and realize that the waves may be big but there have been bigger waves and there will be again, and it’s all just part of the flow, it makes it easier to deal with what’s going on in that moment. But damn, I’m getting crispy. Where are the horse latitudes?