The Bridge #121
in which we putter around... on our way towards healing
Hello
& Welcome. Welcome especially to those who are new subscribers! It’s been almost 5 years since I started The Bridge, and it’s not only been a poetic exercise connecting professional and personal across cultures and a diversity of different topics, empowering readers and writer both to take new actions. The Bridge has also become part of a larger bridge carrying me towards the life I most wanted to lead. May our lives be an inspiration to those who follow. Thanks for joining in the conversation!
The other day I was feeling rather down and out. Sadness sunk into the bones; my mind felt like mush. I didn’t know what to say or do. Not a proud moment. I was a bit lost, we might say.
My wife (whom I prefer to call my “life partner” or simply “partner”), she happened to come into the apartment on this day, and she saw me. Which had me a little embarrassed. I wanted to turn invisible. The caterpillar in the chrysalis probably feels similarly: why are you looking at my mushy self as though this were a zoo? I wanted to disappear entirely from her view.
Fortunately, my partner did take notice of me (despite my wishful thinking), and she cared enough to ask how I was doing. Then she listened and hugged me and was patient, and I am very grateful for all that. She asked me what I planned to do for the rest of the day. I told her (in fact, I mumbled) that I planned to “putter around like a bum.” She didn’t know those words, so I had to explain:
Imagine an old man or someone aimless moving with a lethargic energy, maybe sitting around, maybe moving this way and that with his slippers on, puttering (as though running out of steam), relaxed, not trying very hard.
Something to Consider
Imagine we take the high road, and we’re feeling full of energy, we’re feeling maybe even a bit morally righteous. We imagine ourselves with sunglasses looking so cool and clearly the hero of this story we’re making up based on various movie clichés…
Then everything blows up.
We fall down a few rungs, we end up underground, buried under rumble, coughing a bit, bruised probably, dazed and confused maybe. We’re still alive somehow, and we have to walk / crawl our way out, and we find ourselves in a cave with a long tunnel.
There’s the expression “the light at the end of the tunnel” — and sure enough, there’s a light we see in the far-away distance. And where we are, it’s not all dark, not pitch black. Some dim lights have been installed on the ceiling at intervals, illuminating the path just enough we’re not likely to run into any walls. We’ll need to be careful not to trip, but also we’re encouraged because the lights on the ceiling tell us that someone has come through this tunnel before, and they made it out, and then they came back and helped others (like us) who’d come through in the future navigate the tunnel more easily. Something to be grateful for.
Something to Read
And so I feel grateful for people like the author of “Deep Fix” — Alex Olshonsky himself a coach, like me, who cares about bettering the state of the world AND who also recognizes the importance of personal well-being.
What we give attention to is what grows. As a father who is seeking to offer a more stable and secure center for my kids to grow around, the love I have felt activate in me (when I care for myself first) is growing towards others at a pace that feels sustainable and lively, rather than relentless and unwieldy. I am grateful to be in relationship with others who help pull me slowly yet continually towards “being OK.” Because when we connect with contentment, we can keep going (step by step), even if it feels like everything is blowing up. We will find the tunnel and keep going.
Alex Olshonsky (for those lacking the time to read his entire piece) describes here a simple practice that involves paying attention to the well-being / inner peace / contentment that already exists within us, and which we can help grow by giving it more attention more often. Then (without overcomplicating things), he concludes:
“Fundamental wellbeing is, at bottom, a nervous-system shift—from chronic threat detection to a baseline of embodied safety. From that steadier platform, our capacity for effective action actually expands… The deeper fix is realizing nothing essential was ever wrong, even as we keep showing up imperfectly within an imperfect culture and, to borrow Jon Kabat-Zinn’s perfect phrase, embrace the full catastrophe of living.”
Something to Hear
Maybe I’m not a lazy ol’ bum, but I do feel a little like a digital hobo, riding the rails for the fun, moving along lesser-known paths, leaving behind clues that I was here, and maybe helping others find their way in a terrain that could look unfamiliar.
Kiesza is an artist who loves to dance and who has long ago made this one-shot video in a less-crowded part of Brooklyn while dancing to a song she’s created called “Hideaway” which gives me a feeling of being folded into a special-for-me, invisible place, where I can be asleep, awake, or dreaming, but where I don’t have to be self-conscious of what others think of me. I’m hidden away, loved.
Kiesza is also a music artist who got into a car accident (a few years after this music video was made), and she received a brain injury, and recovered and lived! She’s in recent years made new music, which is simply incredible. We can keep going, even after catastrophe 😀
Taking me higher than I've ever been before /
I'm holding it back, just want to shout it, give me more /
You're just a hideaway, you're just a feeling /
You let my heart escape beyond the meaning /
Not even I can find a way to stop the storm /
Oh, baby, it's out of my control, what's going on? /
You're just a chance I take to keep on dreaming /
You're just another day, that keeps me breathing /
Something to Practice
Remember there is light that shines on us when we’re in the mush, and that the cocoon is to protect us, even if it also makes us feel a bit small, but the time will pass, and we will “get out there” again… sometime soon. Remember that we might at times feel like we are traveling underground in tunnels, unsure when it will again be the case that we receive the clarity we’d gotten used to in the bright sunlight. We are not alone; others have come before. We can keep going.
Healing,
JPC