The gift is not knowing

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

The whole decade of my twenties has come to a close.

And now, 30.

I can’t quite believe I’ve been writing these birthday reflections for as long as I have. In so many ways I feel like my twenties have flown by and have, too, contained multitudes and lifetimes within lifetimes all at once. As always, I circle back annually to mark yet another sun lap culmination, my July 6th to July 6th, my becoming

and undoing

and coming apart.

And here I sit prepared, excited even, to dive headlong into another year and brand new decade.

I think back to me at nineteen, on the precipice of my twenties and the full blown existential crisis I had at the thought of being twenty. In hindsight (always 20/20) I can realize now how so many subtle and powerful societal expectations for what my twenties were SUPPOSED to look like, contain, accomplish were so at odds with what I WANTED my twenties to be. It’s wild this idea that our twenties are where we “figure it all out”…where we tap in to the ~big secret of life~

As a kid I used to panic when adults would say that “no one has it figured out.” Are you kidding? The adults don’t know what’s going on, either?? That’s supposed to COMFORT ME?

But now, at nearly-thirty, I feel so much relief that none of us have it all figured out because (are you ready?)

The big secret to life is that…

There is no big secret.

Instead of being frozen in fear by the need to know what’s next, what’s best, what’s right, needing to know if I made the right mistake (or the wrong one)… I have been freed by NOT knowing, NOT worrying, NOT questioning.

What a gift!!

I don’t need to know the answers. I don’t need to worry about the life, choices, and things that were (or could have been, or might have been)

It has saved me hours of anxiety and grief to let the “what if” and the “but what about” and regrets go.

For me, it always comes back to this quote from Cheryl Strayed:

“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

Most of my twenties felt like lighting a giant fire on the beach throwing all of my hopes and dreams into a massive SOS signal in the hope that someone, literally anyone, would answer all of these impossible questions. I have so much love for Kaeleigh in her twenties knowing that impossible to answer questions don’t have an answer (it’s literally in the name) but feeling like the very core of existence was hinging on AN answer, any answer. Some guidepost or mile marker or maybe a goddamn guru a la Eat Prayer Love to tell me I’d done the right thing or for a crumb of guidance if I didn’t. Literally begging for a reprieve from the vilification-of-self over every almost-decision, what-if, or even the decisions made confidently (stick-thin eyebrows, thick-ass eyeliner: I’m looking at you).

Am I where I thought I’d be at thirty?

It depends on which iteration of me over the past 30 years you ask.

And therein lies the answer:

I’m not, in any significant percentage, where or who I thought I’d be at thirty based on literally anything I thought I knew or who I thought I was, at any point. They’re all the ghost ships of that sister life. And thank ALL THE DIETIES for that! If I am allergic to anything it’s the idea of anything in our lives being fixed. And, yet, we weirdly move through our impossibly miraculous and difficult-enough-as-is lives as though each decision is fixed and, as a result, the person we are because of those decisions is, too.

I made a lot of a mistakes in my twenties (and prior). And I’m not done making them! I’m grateful not to be scared by that anymore.

In therapy a few weeks ago (in regard to something different but it applies here, too) my therapist asked “if I had the opportunity to go back if I’d have done anything differently?” It’s a question that certainly holds some rose-tinted-glasses-allure, if not some real good Disney magic. But the answer is simple: I’ve no idea what my life would be or who I’d have become if any crossroads had been navigated differently or if I’d kissed that other guy at the hostel in Paris or if I’d had a baby or if

or if

or if.

Millenia could be wasted away pontificating and or wondering or imagining those what if’s but it holds me in THEN. I’ve already done what I’ve already done, been where I’ve been, not gone where I haven’t, kissed who I did and not who I didn’t. I’ve wasted so much time entertaining the “then” and all the wonderings and questions that come with it. I don’t want to waste anymore time when I have RIGHT. NOW.

Thirty feels so powerful and peaceful to me and I am so grateful to join hands with her on this next celestial sun lap. This birthday, too, feels pregnant with importance: there are two men I’ve loved deeply that never got to see 30, this is the first decade of my life neither of my parents are alive or selfless enough to see. There have been years of my own life I was so sure survival was impossible. I wind up saying it every year but the gift of being here, of having survived all of my thens and what ifs and yesterdays, is that I have arrived safely at every “tomorrow” thus far. The gift of being here is not lost and me. I hope it never is.

I hope I am never too lost or too hopeless to forget the absolute miracle it is that, somehow, I wound up alive when I did, as I am, with the people I love.

And that all the impossibilities of that allow me to be on this weird fucking space rock that has dogs, mountains, the ocean, people I love and have loved and those I will get to love. I get to feel strong in my body lifting heavy things and climbing mountains and diving into glacier lakes. I get to smell good food and coffee and the asphalt after the rain. I get to cry about dogs, my students, this planet I am so grateful to be on. See all the places and faces I have found so memorable and beautiful.

Go to google earth.

Zoom out.

Even further.

Further than that.

We are on a space rock, dude.

And all our love, pain, joy, loss, beauty, and being is here. Our survival rate, even on our worst days is 100%. We GET to be here. The impossibility of that? The grandeur of that? The JOY of that? And as far as we all know we only get all THIS once.

As I sit on the front door of a new decade in my thirties, ready to join hands with 30 and be more adventurous and gentle and patient and kind to her, I just feel so damn grateful. Sure, I’m just another adult who doesn’t have the answers…

But

If I’m honest?

I couldn’t ask for a better birthday gift than that.

Here’s to another 70 years of not knowing the answers.

Sound good? Sounds good to me.

Catch ya on the flip!

Twenties, out!

Thirties: welcome! I can’t wait to keep going.

Love and Ever-earning,

KR

Present Tense: A Love Letter to Twenty-Nine

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. And now? 29.

A decade of these ramblings-turned-journal-entries; love letters to who I was, am, and will be. A never-ending-Russian-nesting-doll, this becoming, this humanity. This cocoon of womanhood: ethereal, enticing, engaging and, sure, enraging at times, too.

If you’ve been around here long enough you know that this writing on my birthday, the week before or eve-of is my yearly undoing, yearly assessment, my penny-in-the-fountain, wishing and wanting not youth but, simply, more living. I’ve never counted the years January to January but, rather, July 6th-July 6th.

It’s where I began and how I have become. A yearly remembrance on the precipice of another jaunt around the sun has only ever felt appropriate. A few nights ago I awoke in a haze: both jolted awake and, yet, nearly asleep. What awoke me were the words I needed to write this year.

I’m not sure how to explain it but, somehow, the past near-decade of birthday blogs come to me in snippets, dam-breaks, or smack-dab-in-the-middle-of-the-night. I do not write them so much as allow them to pour out. Each year, as my birthday approaches, there isn’t a plan or outline. The words simply come to me, be it in snippets or dam-breaks of middle-of-the-night-awakenings, and I simply become the vessel through which those words are born. I am 10/10 the past decade in the words I needed from eve-of-twenty to eve-of-twenty-nine. If they are healing or helpful to you, too, then welcome. If not, here’s where I am as I prepare to jump headlong into the last year of my twenties.

When I awoke around 1:00 am on July 1st I awoke from a ride across what, seemingly, was DNA. Presumably my own but I cannot be sure. It was very rainbow-road-Mario-Kart-esque but in calmer colors and John Mayer as the soundtrack. Here is what I jotted down in my notes app as I fought that space between acutely-awake and desperately-sleepy:

I look at and think of my strands of DNA as the hurt, the healed, and the holy. I have spent so much of my life trying to ignore one, dive headlong into another, all the while forgetting the common thread of both my healing and my hurting which is, for me as for you, the life force that is our holy humanity. Twenty-nine feels both a silly and a solid age. As I prepare to dive into this 29th lap around the sun I find myself returning to the last decade spanning 19-29. I remember having so much fear and anticipation of entering into my twenties ten years ago. Maybe because we are sold this idea of our twenties being our first real decade of weight; 0-10 and 10-20 being a childhood and, in many ways, I think we’re built to digest this idea that our twenties are our adulthood; everything prior is childhood and everything after is the slow decline to AARP and death. Yet, despite this, I feel incredibly humbled, even excited, to arrive at 29. The privilege of living my twenties, wringing them out for all they are worth, is not lost on me. The 365-day-march toward my 30’s is (honestly!) really exciting. But, not yet 29, I find myself reminding myself to not skip to that. At least not yet. I have one final year in my twenties and my thirties will slowly unfurl once I do this final-lap-of-my-twenties but I need to do it first.

I am deeply, irrevocably lucky that, so far, I have woken up on 100% of the tomorrow’s that has followed, as they do, each of my yesterday’s. Sit in that a second. Each of your yesterdays and each of mine has had a tomorrow that followed it: a 100% statistic that I am grateful for, for your sake and for mine. The beauty and the fragility of our holy human-ness is that 100% is a statistic of our uncountable tomorrow’s that we can no more control than the weather, our circumstance, our skin color, the time and space that aligned that we might end up on this planet in the first place.

The days lately have made it hard, truly goddamn hard, to always feel 100% grateful that space and time (maybe god, if you subscribe to the notion of her) aligned in such a way that we are on this planet, now or at all. The staying, the hanging on and letting go, of our holy humanity has been a vice and a freedom in my life: sometimes both in the same day and, others, each in their season. Sometimes the season of vice or of freedom last for actual seasons, often seconds, but most often in the typical wax, wane, ebb, and flow that being a human simply is.

As I step this week (or tomorrow or today, depending on when you read this) into twenty-nine I am working on living twenty-nine in present tense. Some days it will feel like the first time. Others, as interwoven and connected and natural as the healinghurtingholy that is our humanity, our DNA. I will try to remember that, just as I cannot dis-entwine my DNA, so, too, can I not remove the healing or the hurt or the holy from my humanness. What would any of us be, truly, without any of it?

It is such an weighty, tender gift to step tomorrow into the last three hundred sixty-five days of my twenties. I hope that I can be ever-present in them: feel the books I read in my hands, thank the strength of my legs for the hikes, lifts, and walks, wipe the eyes that allow me the gift of consuming this world through such an awe-inspiring medium when they overflow with love or gratitude or anger or fear, and be grateful, ever grateful, to the hands that hold my dog, snuggle my cats, caress my husband’s handsome face, and write these words:

Honoring twenty-eight: grateful for the trip it was,

the lessons it had,

the pain + frustration it held,

and the gratefulness to have arrived at each of it’s tomorrows from their subsequent yesterdays.

And step into three-hundred-sixty-five days of present tense living thorough the last

hurting,

healing,

holy year of my twenties.

To our humanness

and the way it binds us to our earth,

to others,

and to ourselves.

Present. Tense.

Not backward.

Not tomorrow.

Just each small, precious moment at a time.

Ready…set…GO!

Love and ever-learning,

-KRS

All Chance

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

I’m trying to live to ninety-three and see the old me

When I was in second-grade I had this idea of what I’d look like and who I would be as an adult. In all my imaginings I never really pictured me more than I pictured this anonymous looking adult, not really with my features but definitely embodying my dreams: a veterinarian, surrounded by animals. reading books and maybe writing a few. Now, having taught second graders, all these anonymous musings of my own childhood have more light, namely shining upon how much I had no clue; physically, tangibly, emotionally, truly on what it looks like and feels like to grow up. That’s the beauty of being a kid, everything is grand gesticulation, everything can be hypothetical, nothing is really real because your imagination is more tangible than your reality.

I am once again seven years old, in line for hot lunch at Southworth Elementary, I pick up my spork and napkin packet. The little number engraved on the back of my plastic fork is 62. My best friends is 36. She looks sad “Thirty-six means I’ll die before you.” Larger age, longer life. Though true, it was not dependent upon the spork number. In fact, too soon, we’d all learn–in our own ways–how little control we had. How the ins and outs of living aren’t logical, living life (and not, necessarily a long one, either) could be as simple as not taking the same road where the accident happens, not doing the drugs at the party, not being in the university classroom when the gunman barges in.

All chance.

When they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street corners of cynicism and defeat

Too soon we grow up. The sting of heartbreak, the voices that whisper sinisterly in the parts of ourselves we’ve deemed too broken, not enough, too much; the kiss of death. They tell us it is a blink of any eye. That if we turn our backs for one second too long it can happen. And it does and, though they warned us, we’ve the naivete to be surprised, maybe even angry, most likely a bit sad when it happens. It does happen. They do not lie. We blink or turn our backs and we are suddenly ten, sixteen, twenty, and nearing thirty with trepidation and joy and, hopefully, some healthy wreckless abandon because it is chance, after all.

So much has changed and yet, somehow, time is in juxtaposition of itself: it is flying and it is standing still and we are, at once, dizzy and grounded in the-eye-of-the-storm-that-is-growing-older-and-realizing-we-are. Holding space for the many who do not get to. Life is a balance of hanging on and letting go and hoping you do the right one at the right time.

All chance.

I get to cross the threshold from my twenty-seventh year into my twenty-eighth. The miracle of this existence is not lost on me, the weight of what it means to grow old is not lost on me, either. I hope it never is. The older I get the more of a tender-sacredness I adopt for living, even on the hard days. Staying is sometimes the hardest thing we do: the routine, the rhythms, the showing up. A few weeks ago I sat in the new apartment of some of my best friends. Little pockets of people were talking: beer (IPA’s aren’t good, Brandon), tattoos, families. A quiet lull and suddenly our individual conversations merged into a group conversation. I’m not sure how, but eventually we started talking about the finite and the finality of living: life, death. If I think too much about how one day I will not be here to feel the sun, to laugh with my friends, to eat good food, to walk through joy and despair with my people it makes me really, very emotional. But in that moment I felt the weight and importance of these moments; death cannot take these moments from me: the big and little ones. The significant and the seemingly insignificant.

I suppose my point is that no one else, before or after us, gets to take part in, experience these moments. They are ours. What I took from that moment with my friends might be totally different from what they took. What I heard and how I interpreted it is mine. The gift of continuing to arrive to our birthdays is that we continue to stack up these moments, no one else will experience, feel, think, and move through this daily hanging-on-and-letting-go balance like we do. The Freddie Gibbs album ‘Alfredo’ has a song titled “Something to Rap About.” There is a part of the song where Freddie Gibbs muses “I’m trying to live to ninety-three and see the old me.” It’s not lyrical genius, by any means, but every time I hear the line it makes the hair on my arms stand up.

When I was in second grade imagining myself and my life it was grand and incredible and amazing. But having gone through life for twenty-eight spins ’round the globe, some days floating through and others trudging, I realize it is so, so much more than even my seven-year-old-brain, alight with imagination, could have dreamt. I know that twenty-eight is not old. But some days it doesn’t feel young, either. Year by year my truest hope is that I continue to grow up enough that I gain more and more of that hindsight 20:20. That I can reflect on twenty-eight in another twenty-one years as I reflect on being seven, now. I do not pray but “I’m trying to live to ninety-three and see the old me” is, for all intents and purposes, my prayer.

For me, for you. For all of us. That we can continue to hold the precious, tender, finite reality of this living close. That our hands are open to the world more than they are clenched. That our hearts remain tender, even if the risk we run is tatter. That when the world gives us hatred, cynicism, and threatens defeat us… that we remember these moments, our moments, that they are ours. They are perfect, even more so because they are numbered. We won’t get any clues, not even the numbers on the back of a spork.

All chance.

If, by chance, I get sixty-five more years, here is my promise to you: I will not forget my own humanness. And every chance I get I will explore what that means with honesty, intention, and a heart wide open. Living is my greatest gift, but it’s yours, too.

I am so grateful for a twenty-eighth year, thankful for chance.

Love and Ever-Learning, KS

xxxx

Little Bird

My husband and I have lived in the same apartment complex for four, going on five years. Our building was built in 1959, the same year my mother was born, making it almost sixty-two years old. It isn’t derelict, by any means, but it definitely is not new or updated by any stretch of the imagination. We are at the base of one, of many, of the hills in Seattle and our building is situated in just such a way that, when it is windy, you can feel the building groan as the wind whips thorough.

All of our buildings walkways are exterior, there are no internal hallways or key-code entries. If I were a realtor I might word it as “open-air” which, in this case, just means those groaning winds live right outside our front door. Every couple of units there are big, red, old-school fire alarms (round and, probably, loud like in every cartoon depiction) kitty corner from the unit entryways. They stick out just slightly, the little indent of the big red alarm, surely, a good hiding place from the winds and weather.

For the nearly-five-years we’ve lived here, mama and papa birds have made nests behind these alarms. Bringing life, hiding out, seeking shelter behind something that would typically signal danger. I have always loved the poetry of that. So, too, have I loved those birds. I can hear the nestlings in the spring as they hatch just outside our bedroom window, I see the mamas and papas flitting from behind their alarm-safe homes out into the big world to get food, and, usually, I don’t even mind if they happen to shit on my car en route to their dinner.

Growing up my mom always had birdfeeders of any kind with every feed imaginable outside our windows. I have deeply engrained and fond memories of watching humming birds, blue jays, and yellow-tailed finches joining me for breakfast just outside the big storm windows. When I was five, a baby hummingbird ended up trapped in our garage on a hot summer day. And my parents, either not-yet-separated or trying-again-at-marriage, tried desperately to get her out safely. I remember being crisscross applesauce in the driveway watching them communicate, poorly, about how to save the tiny baby. Eventually, exhausted, the baby hummingbird collapsed near me in the driveway. My mom, adamant the bird was dead, told my dad to bury it. But, as I looked down at that tiny little bird, I saw her heart as it pushed against her chest: terrified, exhausted. She laid there next to me for quite some time before, eventually, she took off as if nothing had happened. She got to live, what I hope, were many more days.

In the antithesis of this, about a week ago, after hearing the birds outside our home tweeting away, I left our little apartment and found one of the mama or papa bears dead on our walkway. I found myself so deeply connected to these birds, in a way a link to myself throughout my whole life, and found myself equally as moved upon finding another tiny little bird; this one not fortunate enough to live many more days. I, again, thought of the irony of the fire-alarm-home that had kept them safe all these years living, in many ways, right alongside us. What would signal, to us, the danger of our home had been their safety. In tears, I went back inside to grab my gardening gloves and my shovel.

Their little body was so small; delicate twig feet, slight and pointy beak, feathers laying just so. They looked, save for the cold-stiffness of death, almost asleep. I cradled their tiny body and (still crying) buried them the best I could amidst the very concrete jungle we inhabit. I cannot quite say why, but I knew that this tiny little creature who had, unintentionally, brought me so much joy over the years deserved to be treated, one final time or maybe the first, with all the care in the world. It is what I want for every one I love, for myself, for my friends, for my family: gentleness and care.

As we sit on the precipice of this new year I want us all to consider care….

Have you taken the time to notice the tiny things (I, surely, do but not nearly as often as I should)? Can treat those around you, especially yourself, with more tenderness, attention, and compassion? Perhaps you feel as though you have missed so, so much simply because you were looking at the forest and not the trees. Or. The trees and not the forest. How many others things have I, myself, watched slip away to never come back simply because I was focused on

Now

Later

Then

But what if..?

What now…?

It has been a hell of a year for all of us,

some more than others for countless,

infinite reasons.

Maybe you have felt like me, so overcome by all the big things that the small things, too, feel like a sucker punch.

Maybe you’ve been oblivious to the people, or creatures, living life right alongside you. Maybe you’ve ceased to offer compassion and tenderness because it has not been given to you first. Perhaps, like many of us, you are tired. You are pouring from a cup long empty and do not have the time or the power or the wherewithal to even think, let alone act, on attention, tenderness, compassion. Take a second.

What are those tiny, twig-delicate elements of your day to day existence that you are missing? Taking for granted? Not noticing all together?

I do not want to live the rest of my life not noticing the tiny the bird, while they are here or when they are gone. I want to be moved by all the things, especially the tiny things, because maybe being broken, sometimes, is the hand-me-down sweater to becoming.

I don’t have a lot of wisdom going into this year. I don’t have a do-gooder list of all the things I learned or want to carry forward. I think that resolutions are shit and always will be.

But what if, between you and me, we promise to keep each other accountable for not missing the things that pass us by, hm? Every day I get older the more desperate and hopeful I become that I will keep my eyes open, my heart tender, and my hands seeking for more ways I can help instead of hurt.

I know it’s a big ask. But it’s the only thing I got.

This tender heart. These seeking hands. These blind, blind eyes.

Each day that goes by I’m just trying to seek, asking to seek, just a little bit more.

Maybe when they say “This one’s for the birds”…

They really meant that every day,

until we, too, are buried,

we will be asked to make a home in a place that is not safe, that does not promise us kindness.

Just maybe.

But we live on anyway.

xxxx

KS