I just realized that it is almost end of August. Year 2020. Did that just go so fast that you think this year was an out of body experience?

I know it’s COVID and everything is shut down and our lives are bizarre. This whole year whizzed by like lightning. But I have to tell you as a 50 year old person, I have realized that the years are moving fast anyway. When my kids were little, time stood still. When we were potty training them, it felt like they would never learn how. When they had to sleep through the night, it felt like that was never going to happen. But now, I can’t keep up with marking the wall with their heights on the first day of school and the first day of their birthdays. It’s like watching Nascar cars zoom by.

Time freaking flew.

Does that realization make you feel grounded? Or does it feel like you are in a spinning centrifuge ride in a carnival?

One of our friends, who is 76 years old and lives in France, was doing a little life review with us about a year ago. The year before that, she had  lost both of her brothers to cancer 8 months apart. Both were diagnosed and died within 8 weeks. One was 6 years older. The other was 5 years younger. Death of your siblings does a number on your psyche for sure. She was saying she wishes she could get a second stab at life. She felt like she would do things differently. Maybe work less as a younger mother. Maybe give herself some break here and there to spend more time with her siblings. She is pretty sure she would not have signed up to do a double shift every chance she got. She said she would tell her younger self that she was being too hard on herself and on her kids when they were growing up because she could not keep it together. She was an ICU nurse. She was getting her masters and hardly remembers what the kids were doing at that time.

She sees us spending so much intentional time with the kids and really having boundaries around our work commitments and wishes she had lived more intentionally.

I always say, we do the best we can with what we got. It is hard to think beyond our current moment. But I worry that what she is doing now is worse. She is living in the past and wishing she was present then. She is missing the present thinking about the past. She is not thinking about what’s possible tomorrow because she can’t get over the past. It is a mind trap you cannot free yourself from.

I have moved so many times in my life. It’s hard to make roots when you move. Hard to make meaningful relationships and maintain close friendships. So much harder when we moved 3500 miles into the middle of the Pacific ocean.

It gets harder to make new friendships as you get older. It is much harder in Hawaii. People come here and can’t stay and move back to the mainland. So people here, while friendly, are wary of making new friendships with mainlanders because they don’t quite trust that we are going to stick around for the long haul.

During Yalda, which is the winter Solstice festival, we celebrate by staying up eating dried fruit and nuts. Fresh pomegranate (in anticipation of winter) and watermelon (memory of summer) and we read poetry to one another. We light a candle and try to stay up until midnight. I had mentioned that we read Rumi poetry like it is a form of fortune telling. Close our eyes, randomly open a page and read it. Read it enough times to have it make sense somehow and tell us of a deeper meaning about the life we have at hand at the moment. Rumi is the father of mindfulness for me. So pretty much everything he writes can apply to appreciating our current life.

On the night of Yalda, we do the same, except with the poetry of Hafiz.

When I moved to Hawaii in the year 2017, I felt even more isolated -without any roots of my own. There is a sadness in being uprooted so often in one’s life. You feel like you are a tumbleweed. You are not attached to your past nor your future. But you are so often moving that you cannot even be present in the moment.

Until I read the Hafiz poem the night of Yalda that year…

“I wish I could show you when
you are lonely or in darkness
at the astonishing LIGHT of
your own BEING.

To show you the place you are
right now, God circled on a MAP
for you.

To remind you that ever since
HAPPINESS heard your name, it
has been running through the
streets TRYING TO FIND YOU.”

-Hafiz

Happiness has been running through the streets trying to find me.

That is a grounding thought. I will take that with me. That is the only way I can live. To be present. To accept that this is my life. To not waste my life with coulda, woulda, shoulda. To love everyone a little more than I think I should. Call my sister and brothers many times a week and stay connected to all who matter to me. Knowing one day they will be gone.

Wherever I may go.

So much love to all of you