A few months ago I was writing words, soooo many words. My inner dialogue sounded a lot like this: “Oh my gah! Sooo much to do, to get out there, especially now with Covid breathing down my back. Is time speeding up? Sure feels like it. Keep up the pace Nicole, carry on already!” I realized I hadn’t moved anything but my fingers in hours. “Take a break, Nik!” my inner mama bear chided. Good one, okay. I got up, inhaled some chips and guac, and marched Daisy out for a mini walk.
Twenty or so minutes later I sat back down at my computer, ready to get at it. My computer screen had gone to sleep. Exercising classic Nicole impatience, I tap tap tap tap tap tapped the keyboard, “Wake up already!” I growled.
Wake up, it did not. What I thought was my computer being very lazy was instead, the dreaded black screen of death. GAAAAAAHHHH! Nightmare right? Perhaps like you, I LIVE ON MY COMPUTER. Now, during these precarious times, more than ever
The next day I woefully dropped off my sad computer to the repair place. The sympathetic guy said it would be a least a week, you know, because of the global pandemic and all. I left, my tail between my legs and my head hanging low. Then, I thought, “Well, I get it, I get it…it’s all good, you’ll be fine.” But the other five thousand parts of me FREAKED OUT. Fear, anger, concern, no Schitt’s Creek, lonliness, isolation, no livestrem yoga classes…all the imagery about the week to come started to flood in. I did not like what I saw.
What would I LITERALLY do?
What I literally did, was this: I relented. I mean, what greater evidence did I need to see that I was being handed an ideally inspired moment to just free fall into the unknown. I’m already staying in anyway, I might as well make a thing of it!
I got quiet, that’s for sure. Quieter than I thought possible.
My computerbattical ended up being a precious time, a short period I want to always remember and integrate into who I am. I cooked meals so slowly and with care. I ate with full attention on my food, distraction free. I savored warm baths. I relished the privelege of clean water. I doubled my ‘getting ready’ time—something I used to rush through. I puttered. I stalled. I thought about everything. I just sat there and thought and thought.
I got my computer back, even a day or so early. But what burnt out in it, also burnt out in me: that hurriedness, that gotta go go go mode, that intense pressure valve that required two hands to crank shut. Daisy is happier too, the walks are longer and I don’t rush her through her five minute long plant sniffs.
I know this time is so very challenging and my heart hurts every day when I talk to my mom-friends or catch the news cycles. The struggle most definitely is real. I so dearly hope though, in all of this, that if you see a moment—ten minutes, or ten days or whatever—to move into a place that feels spaciously uncomfortable, that you take it. Savor it. Let it nurture you and delight you. Let it change you and inform you. Resist filling up the space. And let it be a place you find that you can go back to, again and again.
