I love the song "Slow Boat to China" as sung by Peggy Lee and Bing Crosby. It makes me think about getting away from it all; where the destination is less important than the journey. Life has been crazy, and despite how much I try to press "pause" it just seems to keep chugging along. I need that slow boat to come along and save me from the crazy that is life.
Realistically, I won't be getting on a boat anytime soon unless it's a little Sunfish at Lakeside....so I need to figure out a way to slow things down without throwing open the escape hatch. I'm pressing pause on social media as a way to slow things down. I need to take time to reflect, unwind, and figure out what is important again in life. Lent is the perfect opportunity for such a re-boot. Mardi Gras and Lent are always a period of reflection for me, because Mardi Gras 2009 is the date Lydia earned her angel wings, and the next 40 days that was Lent that year for me, was definitely a period of infinite inner reflection which I liken to tempering steel. It's a process that still seems to be underway for me. How do you become immune to the hardships of life, while not being so hard that you lose the softness that makes you human? I think that's the struggle I've been in for nine years.
My faith has gone through many incarnations over the course of these nine years...I think I am in an ever evolving thought process of what it all means. Even when I feel lost or flailing about what it all means, I come back to what I believe I've tried to live out with varying degrees of success over the years: find the middle path. I've had many occasions to think about what the "middle path" means to me in many different contexts in my life. I think about it terms of my role as wife and mother balanced against my life as a lawyer....think of it like balancing on a fulcrum. Lean one way, and you lose the edge that makes you an effective lawyer; lean the other way, away from mother/wife, and you lose the edge that makes you soft enough and gracious enough to be a loving parent.
We can also think about this in terms of any tenet in life...lean one way too much and you lose the form of whatever that tenet is; lean the other way too much and you loose the substance behind the form. It seems very difficult for people including me to balance on this fulcrum. We like to stake positions out on the poles. But when we do that, we lose the ability to see the other side. We lose the ability to connect with others on the other pole. Sometimes we need to slow down and think about what we are really doing and live intentionally, rather than have a knee jerk emotional reaction or simply acting out of adherence to dogma. What seems most important are those red thread connections to others. When we think about how we will be remembered or the legacy we want to leave our family, what would that look like? I hope that my family knows I love them, and that they are the most important thing in my life, but I have to prove that by my choices and not just through lip service. Of course, that has to be balanced against my need to work, make a living, and have some internal intellectual and emotional connections for myself...so back to balance.
Back to social media. Sometimes I think social media makes us less balanced, with more tendency to hang out on the poles or extremes. It also inhibits our ability to live intentionally by causing us to be distracted from what's really important and focusing more on image instead of substance. So, I'm going to spend this Lent AWOL from social media so that I can live that intentional life, and hope to achieve some level of equipoise among all the facets of my life. I'm going to try hop aboard that Slow Boat to China, and find that balance that seems to elude us all at various points during this journey called life. My wish for you is that you achieve that balance as well! Namaste!
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