I love when Daylight Saving Time ends.

1. The kids keep the same time so they are in bed earlier and are more rested the next day. This lasted for almost the whole winter last year.
2. I think my body very much appreciates the time changing. I tend to stay up late and wake late but the shift of the hour pushes me to finish the night sooner and wake up having caught more z’s. Gaining that extra hour fills in some sort of time gap and I am good to go.
   

The whole things reminds me that time is a human-made concept. We have the power to shift the concept to work for us. We create our own reality.

Growing up, I had many responsibilities and as I got older, I assumed more and more.

Assuming responsibility means to step forward and take charge without being asked. I literally assumed I was responsible for many things. And when no one, particularly an adult, said they would take those responsibilities, there place was cementedm.

Responsibility comes with so much baggage. And the baggage feels necessary, familiar and permanently attached well into adulthood. Releasing that baggage has been and continues to be part of reclaiming my inspired life.

Tonight, I am reading and falling asleep and waking only wanting to read more even as my eyes droop and burn. This doesn’t happen with those dry non-fiction books, at least for me. I wonder who does react that way to non-fiction books?

Humans are drawn to stories. We are always making up stories about our own lives and of those we know. Reading a book gives us an opportunity to get out of our own stories, a welcome break, and into the stories of other people. When it’s stories of lives unlived or stories of people wildly different than us, it gives our brains ideas of how to reconnect our own stories.

Getting lost in a good book serves our imagination and our healing.

I was in a funk the last couple of weeks, brought on by the reality of parenting one adult short in my house. It felt like I had a grayish green haze surrounding me within a 10 ft radius. My usually positive and cheerful outlook was weighed down with additional responsibilities and overwhelm, and the world looked different. 

Today, I experienced a lifting of that haze. I had pessimistic expectations of a conversation, and it surprisingly didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. That surprise disrupted the stream of negative thoughts – it showed my brain a different path to take not only for this conversation but also for everything else going on in my life. 

I have gotten to a point where I can recognize these periods while I am in them. However, being positive isn’t something that one’s brain can conjure up during these funks. This experience has shown me that maybe instead of gaslighting myself and trying to fake positivity, I can welcome the element of surprise instead.

It feels a little funny coming back to writing after the month off. While part of it feels natural like hopping back on a bike, another part feels a little awkward as if my legs have grown but the bike has stayed the same.

While legs grow as they do whether you ride a bike or not, I wouldn’t have grown/changed the same if I stayed and continued writing. I wonder how that version of me would have grown/changed if she continued writing everyday.

It’s funny the things we do to be on the “right” side of history. This spans the micro, like the history within a relationship, to the macro, like the history of the world.

We’ve got to stay diligent to what history we are trying to create. What is “right”? And, what underlying beliefs are driving them?

Sometimes, feelings of safety may hinder someone from being able to do the “right” thing.

Increasing our feeling of safety may give us enough capacity to see the bigger picture, to not feel like our well-being is threatened if we do the right thing. Though, increasing it too much may give us the green light to disengage altogether or act rashly. It seems to be a balancing act like many other things in life.

Limitations in time, and money in many ways, lead to disconnection – from self and each other.

And what actually drives humans?
And what would actually change the world?

(It’s not time or money.)

As the world seems to be falling apart on the other side of the planet, I can’t help but question humanity and our future.

How can people see lives as so disposable?

Why do those deemed more powerful choose murder over connection again and again?

How can everyday people continue on living life while tragedies continue to occur over and over?

Over the last three weeks, I have had so many questions and so little clarity. It is heavy and confusing and draining. And yet it is in no way comparable to living in fear and under threat, living with generations of trauma

As only one person, it feels too big to handle. The energies of grief, fear and despair only take a second to travel around the world, and I can feel them thick in the air. It feels like my questions are following me in thought bubbles that are held up by the density of those energies.

As I look around, I see we are so disconnected from each other because we are disconnected from ourselves. We see ourselves one way because the story tracks, and we cannot see ourselves in an opposing way because the story falls a little apart.

It kinda hurts our brains.

So instead, we warp and manipulate those parts to fall in line with the first narrative. Or we completely swing our sense of self to embrace this opposing idea 100%. The nuance is completely gone.

And then, we go and do the exact same with our stories of other people.

This week, I lived like a “normal*” American family with two parents in the home and I have barely survived to tell the tale.

Part of it is that we need to get our sea legs, get used to new routines and new tasks to complete without my mom around to help. Part of it is that parenting with just two adults in the house is hard!

It’s said that that nuclear family was created with the idea that only one person needed to work to bring in enough to live on. And here we are, in the 21st century, doing as many other families do – dual income household with school aged children who get sick and require to stay home and how does anyone get any home or professional work done?!

After this week, I’d like to call-in American culture and say – this is inhumane! Can we re-embrace villages, three/four-generations homes? Can we create a world where our economic success doesn’t come at the cost of our physical and mental health?

Maybe by week 2 or 3 I’ll be so in the weeds I can’t even remember what it was like to have a third adult in the house. The lack of brain space and mental calories to burn on this injustice is what continues to drive this culture.

*I quote “normal” family only in what is stereotyped as normal by our culture. I acknowledge that families of all kinds exist and those are as “normal” as any other family structure.