I’m not the type of person

I remember reading one of comedian Chelsea Handler’s memoirs during one high school summer, and her saying, through a story of a dinner party, that people who say “I’m the type of person who…” or, “I’m not the type of person who..” are usually the exact opposite of what they’re saying. I found it insightful and funny, and it made me more aware of when I say it—and also when other people say it.

I played these games with myself throughout heavier times of quarantine to stretch my brain or whatever a little, like eating with my non-dominant hand in attempt to become more ambidextrous (it’s kind of working!). One of them was to put a moratorium on “I am” phrases. Like, what would happen to my sense of identity and self, as well as my habits and thoughts, if I wasn’t labeling myself based on past patterns and expectations dragged in from the past, and just let myself be? Honestly, it felt very freeing!

In fact, I may try this again today. And this time, I think I’ll play with extending it more to those around me. Like how may people show up, what may our interactions be, when it’s just us in that moment, rather than past ideas or conceptions of them? Of us?

Everything is a theme

I heard someone say recently that “everything is a theme.“ I first thought of that in relation this blog and creating this space to write, reflect and create in a time when I was called to create more space in my life, often in playful ways, and how this has been, and is, a place to identify and understand themes at various points in my life, to process the past, to be with the present and to look toward the future, ideally, with more conscious awareness and loving attention.

I also found myself seeking a theme, wanting to identify a pattern, mostly because I often find it fun to play around with ideas and ideas identification. I didn’t have one for a while (like, a few days), and then it came to me quietly: patience. How fitting for it to enter that way, too, quietly, over the course of a few days, as I rest back into a month in Puerto Rico, a place where everything feels lusciously slower, a place that is always so patient with me.

That is growth

Someone pointed out to me once that I said, “that’s growth!” a lot, and that they liked that I celebrated that, even the small things. This, in particular, was after something very silly that I can’t remember and I’d said it as a joke, but I appreciated that, because I didn’t even really realize I was doing it, or had done it other times before. (And that, I guess, shows us in and of Itself how valuable, and even critical, other relationships are to reflecting back our own growth, and, as a result, encouraging us to grow even more!)

My therapist called them “sparkling moments,” I think, which reminds me of the little Christmas lights I see twinkling in my Tía Nora’s neighborhood in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, where I sit outside writing this as I listen to the little coqui frogs chirp.

When I was here a year ago, I wasn’t writing here. This place did not yet exist, this blog, and now, here we are. That’s growth!

Allowance

I’ve realized recently that a lot of what comes to me to write here, much of what I anchor around in a form of metaphysical balance, is around allowance.

Let it go, let go.

Let it be enough.

Let it be good.

Let it come.

Let yourself receive.

Live, and let live.

The letting, the surrender, the allowance, the trust of it all, I’ve continue to come to understand, more and more, as maybe the most powerful and empowering thing I can do. So, I allow. I allow it all, to unfold, to come in, to show the way, to guide me, to be big. To enliven my life and help me live, to be even more alive.

Gratitude is a choice

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I woke up and went to bed reflecting on what my friend Brooke often says: “Gratitude is a choice.”

I spent the day mostly offline, not having to work (grateful), with family and family friends (grateful), cooking and enjoying a fresh, healthy meal (grateful), doing Zumba with my lifelong neighbor and friend for an hour, her leading a class of all ages, all of us dancing, smiling, shaking it out (grateful).

How am I grateful? Let me count the ways…

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is an opportunity

Work has become busier lately. It tends to happen at this time, the collective push to wrap things up by end of calendar year (arbitrary timelines, but we’re all bought in, so it is what it is!) when it feels like all we want to do and are meant to do is slow, taking cues from nature, like fall to winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

Last year at this time I completely burned out. I was overextended at work, doing things I wanted to do and felt were important, but were beyond my capacity. I took a month off at the holidays and returned more centered, lighter and resolved—to not reach that point again.

So, this time, rather than see this, and feel this, as a time of stress, concern, burdening, overwhelm, I’m pausing more, reflecting and reframing. This is an opportunity. This is an opportunity to strengthen my boundaries. To prioritize. To decide what I want to do right now, and how I want to do it.

I choose to believe that everything that is presenting itself, for own good, our best good. It’s in service of our growth, and the bigger challenges—or opportunities—show up to show us where we are in that growth, and how we have grown. This is an opportunity; there is an opportunity in this, and in everything.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Sometimes, someone says something you’ve heard before, lots of times, and it’s like you’re hearing it, really hearing it, for the first time. You know?

This happened to me last week at the eye doctor’s, a stylish spot on Abbott Kinney in Venice with all and only international designer frames, exposed concrete walls and big coffee tables books about LA and California that had me daydreaming even though I live here. (I loved it.) I was reading those letters with one eye covered, alternating, right eye, left eye, as instructed. Then I could see it all again, with both eyes. I think I said something to the optometrist like, whoa, that really makes a difference, to which he responded, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” And I sat there, feeling like I was hearing that for the first time ever, seeing clearly again, and it all felt very profound. Maybe it was adding another sense in that made it all make deeper sense.

I looked up the origin of the quote and it seems as though it’s a misquoted quote of Aristotle’s, as it is really, instead, I guess, about Emergence, the properties of a system, or that which “…refers to the existence or formation of collective behaviors — what parts of a system do together that they would not do alone.” (From the New England Complex Systems Institute. A complex name.) This author says the quote would instead be something like, “The System is something beside, and not the same, as its elements.” (And now I know, thanks to that site, that there’s something called an International Council on Systems Engineering and that one can become certified as a Systems Engineering Professional and this is all feeling very complex, but also makes sense, and I’m reminded of how complex is not a synonym for complicated.)

Things have the meaning we give them, anyway, and I think both quotes, both concepts, both aphorisms, feel special and make sense. Or, makes senses.

I'll be glad I wrote this

I was getting ready today with some thoughts softly bumping around in my brain, like a li’l video game, and I was like, I want to write that “expand, not contract” thing I’ve been saying to myself these last weeks. And I was like, maybe I won’t do that right now; maybe I just write this. And it felt like a flowy response from my heart that said right back, “you’ll be glad you wrote this.”

Even just this. Because you wrote it for you, and it felt nice. It is nice to do this. We like this! And then I was like, yeah, I’ll be glad I wrote this. And then it/I continued, a subconscious stream of self-motivation. I’ll be glad I took that trip, and I’ll be glad that I do that bigger thing I’m thinking about for next year, and maybe that other bigger thing, too, yeah. Holding that, moving toward that feels right, whatever happens with it. Because it’s all part of all of it.

I’ll be glad I wrote this.