BALANCE
Thirteen years ago today we were in China at the White Swan Hotel. We were enjoying the experience of becoming parents for the first time, in China. Those of you who haven’t adopted can’t appreciate, I don’t think, what a surreal experience it is when you haven’t been pregnant to be handed a one year old baby in a government office and think: ok, now we’re parents. I’m sure biological parents experience this to some extent, but if you are pregnant there is some level of tangible reality to what is happening. We had a photo, and then poof: a one year old. I think about those days, because never in a million years, during those halcyon days in China did I think Lydia would die from leukemia just four years later.
I often think about time. It’s so hard to live in the moment. Even when you have an experience that makes you appreciate the moment it must be against human nature to just “be”. I’m guessing that hard-wired into our evolutionary brains is this drumbeat that we must plan. It makes sense if you think about our ancestors up until about a hundred or so years ago. If you didn’t plan, if you didn’t store enough food, if you didn’t chop enough wood, you wouldn’t make it through winter. So, it makes sense. So of course we think about the future. And like our ancestors, who told stories sitting around campfires, and who drew paintings memorializing past events on cave walls, we also think about and mull over the past. At the end of the day the place to reside, as with most of life, is somewhere in the middle between the two extremes of carpe diem! and being mired in the past.
I think trauma elevates living in both of those poles to an extreme level. When I think about people I often work with, there is usually at least one, or in some cases, a series of past traumas that push people into ping-ponging between those two poles of living with unheeded abandon in the present and becoming lost in the past. Healthy individuals tend to have a grounding in all three realities: past, present and future. A proper balance among the three.
For awhile after Lydia’s death, I was mired in the past. Then I ping-ponged into carpe diem!, living so deeply in the present that I forgot about the future. It’s taken me a long time to regain a healthy perspective on life. It’s taken a lot of soul searching, meditation, prayer, yoga, and yes, even a bit of work, to constantly remind myself where I need to live.
Recently, Mark and I celebrated our one year of marriage. Of course, we’ve been married, all total, almost 19 years, but last year, after becoming Catholic, we were remarried, so to speak, in the Catholic Church. We chose to get married on July 3rd, Lydia’s birthday so as to try and take a past event that was so bittersweet and make it into a present and future celebratory event. I have to pat myself on the back a bit, and say that this was a very cunning plan and it worked to the point that Lydia’s birthday, for the first time since her death, was not a sad time. In effect, we made a collage of that day, over-lapping happy memories with sad ones, forming a beautiful mosaic.
So as I go about the rest of my summer, I’m going to try to achieve that balance of past, present and future. Too much focus in any one area, and like a yoga pose, I lose focus, and crash to the ground. I’m going to seek a balance among the three, knowing that even if I have to touch down occasionally to re-ground myself, there’s always tomorrow, with no mistakes in it.
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