Pause, Think, and Just Put Yourself Out There
Musings in the Cold November Rain
I sit in my parked car as a drizzle gently drums on the windshield. The soothing pitter-patter of the rain takes me back to my ancestral home. The silvery droplets on the glass obstruct my view of the outside and I let my untethered mind wander. I can almost smell the intoxicating fragrance of the poet’s jasmine twining the trellis in my mother’s garden. Instead of obsessing over every move my 8-year-old daughter is making in her soccer game just a few yards away, I now look closely at how the bulbous raindrops slowly slide down, some succumbing to their impregnation and others to the inevitable pull of gravity. Ah, the constant push and pull of life. We often get these “moments” don’t we? These sudden, unexpected gems that slow down time; that provide some much-needed clarity in an otherwise whirlwind of life; and allow us to find beauty in the ordinary things surrounding us. As a mother of three kids, all under 9, this is a rare treat. These reflective moments. Sitting alone in the car, my initial impulse is to get through my interminable to-do list. Maybe reply to the proverbial pile of messages sitting in my email, chalk down a quick grocery list, plan meals for the week, or maybe even give myself the luxury to check Facebook? That is what I would usually do given the paradoxical task rabbit-cum-procrastinator I am. But today feels different.
Thoughts and Words
Today, I breathe in deeply. Exhale. Inhale. I play around with words in my head to capture this moment. There is an urgency in me to put ink on paper. To give some form and permanence to my thoughts. But I resist opening Word on my phone. For no obvious reason, I want to hold onto this moment and feel it deeply. I want my thoughts and feelings to be louder than the words in my head itching to be spelled out. I want this otherwise mundane moment to completely subsume me before I let out the barrage of phrases — some profound, most amorphous- trapped inside. I want to closely notice the veins on the crispy leaf that has succumbed to the cool temperatures of autumn before I come up with words to describe the palette of colors on its lifeless form. Even in this trance, I wonder if thoughts are given shape before words, or do words spring into mind at the same lightning speed as our thoughts?
The Worlds Within Us
As I sit in my car, indulging in this Foucauldian question one moment, and adding size 5T diapers to my Amazon cart the next, I can’t help thinking, pardon my language, what a big gooey clump of complexity we are. All of us - without exception -have within ourselves entire worlds. Our bodies, our minds are populated with different facets of ourselves: I am a doting wife, a worrying mother, a frantic writer, often a depressive task rabbit, an obsessive house maker, a failing gardener, an inspiring weight lifter, and on and on- you get the idea. All these “characters” — and we truly are each and every one of them for they are no façade — add to our complexity. They are the reason why we so often perplex ourselves (let alone others)! Things that gave us an adrenaline rush yesterday are energy suckers today. Sometimes we feel like we are at the center of it all and at other times our lives seem so mundane, so ordinary. I could be, right at this very moment, just another parent scrolling through the newsfeed while keeping a close eye on my kid’s game. Or a warrior mom connecting to the hive mind of other soccer moms learning the art of letting my firstborn come to her own. Or simply, someone who wanted to put herself out there today. Someone who is grateful to have found this extraordinary moment within her very ordinary life and is here to coax you to do the same. But mostly I am all of them. This is my first post on Medium. I had promised myself to write here every week around 2 months ago. Everything I have written since hasn’t seen the light of day. But I somehow know that this moment has given me the courage to get things started. Whatever you have been waiting to do, just do it today. Cease this moment. Get on that treadmill. Make that call. Put yourself out there. Let’s get a little uncomfortable.
#essay #selfimprovement #creativity
I want to thank Ravyne Hawke, Editor of Promptly Written for this week’s prompt that sparked this rather sudden outpouring of words.
