What keeps us coming back
Resolute Re-inventers! Graham here.
I have this little daybook on my bedside table. I’ve been trying to read it each morning to start my day.
A daybook is a collection of spiritual ponderings, one for each day of the year. I bought it by accident, thinking it was just a regular book, then proceeded to ignore the ‘one a day’ instruction (because no book is gonna tell me how to read it). I then stopped reading altogether a few pages in, adding it to the ‘guilt pile’ of half-read books.
But lately I’ve been craving routine. So I’ve been reading an entry when I wake up, before the day stress seeps in.
Today’s entry was a doozy:
“Things come apart and join sometimes faster than we can cope. But we evolve in spite of our limitations, and though we break and make mistakes, we are always mysteriously more than what is broken….
You see, no one ever told me that as snakes shed skin, as trees snap bark, the human heart peels, crying when forced open, singing when loved open…. And whatever keeps us coming back, coming up, whatever makes us build a home out of straw, out of heartache, out of nothing, whatever ignites us to see again for the very first time, this is the bluish flame that keeps the Earth grinding to the sun.”
Well, shit.
Constant reinvention
Those last lines got me thinking. What does keep me coming back, day in, day out?
When you’re the sensitive type, the stuff of life can feel over-mixed with pain and loss. It can feel that we are forced to reinvent ourselves again and again, to make room for whatever it is that we carry (long before we understand what or why it’s happening.)
This reinvention can feel like chaos, it can feel like failing, until we eventually find our feet again.
What keeps us coming back, through the grind?
When life needs to be smaller
In my own latest reinvention, life has gotten pretty small lately. Ongoing post-Covid fatigue, coupled with Covid-anxieties and my introverted nature have meant I’m often to be found in bed these last few months.
Working from bed, texting friends who I’m too tired to call. Reading. (Thank god for reading.)
The truth is, I don’t mind it. Sometimes life just needs to be smaller.
But it’s left me noticing the repetition of things. Wondering where the days go.
When you have limited energy, you notice what you keep on turning toward, even when it’s harder than it used to be.
For me it’s the work that I most value, and the people I love.
The work
I’ve been running the Big Feels Club for more than five years now, since Honor and I first invited 12 people (mostly strangers) to my living room to talk about feelings.
Big Feels has been the one constant in my work life for that five years. ‘Work’ even when I’ve not been paid for it. ‘Mahi’, as we’d call it in New Zealand, a Māori word that means both ‘work’ and ‘abundance’, which feels about right for the many good things this club has brought into my life.
Big Feels is the work I still do even when I’m stuck in bed. It’s the thing I’m drawn to reinvent, time and again, for reasons I can’t fully articulate - still curious what it could be next, this club, for you, for me, and anyone else who needs it.
This last month, Gareth and I have been scheming about where to next for Big Feels, talking to mental health movers and shakers, with an eye firmly to the future. Often I’ll attend these meetings from my bed, or I’ll prop myself upright and crash afterward. But the work still feels right. I’m drawn to keep coming back, even if I’ve no idea where it will lead.
The people
I’ve been with Honor, my Big Feels co-pilot, for just as long as Big Feels has existed. That day we invited people to my living room to talk about feelings? Honor and I went out for noodles after, then to a park, where we finally shared our tender feelings for one another.
Together we’ve seen mental health crises for each of us, physical health crises for each of us. We’ve seen each other burn out to the crisp with work and life stress, and more. And we’ve watched on as each of us found our way slowly back, time and again, gently nudging each other forwards.
It seems to me we keep finding each other most clearly in the midst of the hard bits.
‘Hey, you’re here too? Still? Look at that!’
The course of love never runs smooth, maybe doubly so for sensitive cats. Maybe it’s not supposed to.
Today I’m grateful for reinvention. For the things that keep me coming back, and the dear ones (and dear community) I get to share that reinvention with.
I’m grateful to what keeps me “seeing life with fresh eyes”.
And I'm grateful to those many other big feelers out there, building a life “out of straw, out of heartache, out of nothing”. Reinventing ourselves with whatever is at hand, to keep on coming back.
Thanks for being with us. Let's see where this wee club goes next? x
My book! It's out now! :)
My eBook, How to Belong on Earth, is available for download now. Read all about it here, or click the big pink button below.
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