Many communities in Florida just got very, very wet. Devastatingly so. I’m upbeat, not because I’m in shock or denial about the four feet in my home. It is because I am resilient.
I’m grateful for trauma over past years that booted me out of a stuck form of safety and into a transformed and more meaningful life. My daily view of everything and everyone is from a vantage point so zoomed-out that only astronauts have beheld the like.
In the past few years I’ve shifted my life to prioritize making my few remaining minutes matter and in a way that can only be defined by me. I’d spent the prior decade decoding why guru inspiration, talk therapy and pop culture self-help was not effecting real and immediate change. I only saw real change happen when I defined a set of action-oriented, tangible, immediate and hands-on hacks and committed myself to applying those tools to my daily life. Since then, I’ve been writing on KindEdge.com as my passion project; I urgently seek to deliver what I’ve learned to others. I’m dying. So are you. We only have so many minutes left; I treat my minutes as the currency through which I invest in my legacy.
In the past I endured financial and emotional trauma that is likely beyond what most can imagine. Many online memes and gurus invite us to label, blame, or slam those who abused our goodness. But righteousness is a band-aid that peels off after a day or two. Blame risks leaving you stuck pointing in the rearview mirror, yet still lacking any new wisdom for handling the @$$hats ahead.
In KindEge.com I write about the hacks I’ve devised for managing my life and impatiently insisting on making today’s minutes matter. I talk about concepts like conscious curation which is a practice of continually cleaning out out every single person, environment and object in your life and re-choosing only that which is truly amazing. I also talk about treating every challenge as a gift and digging hard on hardship until I could find the gift. Through many practices like these I came out of devasting hardship into a fundamentally-transformed life and a superpower called resilience.
My resilience is proving invaluable this morning as my community wakes up to visions of a watery hell. I’m grateful for past abuses, shocks, and dismaying experiences that granted me my superpowers. I experienced years wherein on any given day I would watch hundreds of thousands of dollars disappearing under my feet and from my own bank accounts while emergency court injunctions took three slow months to get scheduled and still resulted in little protection. I recall leaving my beautiful home and the heartbreak of seeing my sons help me give away our large pieces of furniture to a charity. Twenty years of savings, and so many things that I thought were unmovable, were moving. In each of those moments here is the wisdom I dug deep to unearth. I can change to find happiness in many forms and environments. In fact, it is my flexibility that makes me safer than I actually was when I was linked with unsafe people. And though change is hard, I focus on how big the Earth is and how immeasurably far the timeline of history stretches. There are children yet unborn, and women long since dead, and people on the other side of the world, who will, did, or are enduring this type of experience. This type of experience is, in fact, what it means to be alive. And oh, this one golden ticket called life, is one I would never un-choose.
I will never un-choose hardship and when it comes, I will dig to define my own way through it. I will use all my practical KindEdge hacks. I will do just one thing at a time. I will approach re-builds as opportunities to re-choose. When things feel urgent, I’ll refocus on “slow” as the better way. And I will “bite-size” everything into small bits and short cycles of work-reward-work-reward to effect the long, sustainable daisy-chain of progress that carried me through past challenges. I have so many wonderful tools and superpowers. And so do you. We are all connected here on Earth, each of us doing the big job of seeing the next day forward.
For all my friends in Florida who are waking up to nightmares of all sorts, here is one small do-able hack that is within reach. Your biggest job this month is to sleep eight hours per night. That is not easy to accomplish in the midst of a crisis. As I type I’m camping out in the lobby of the Hollander Hotel hoping my spot on the waitlist will yield a room at the inn for tonight. (This non-virgin Mary would gladly take a hay-lined bed away in a manger, but all the mangers are flooded. Plus, tomorrow morning I have my Body Electric poolside yoga class here, so I feel like a greater power will whisper to the wind that I should stay here one more night.)
If you double-down on your commitment to sleep, you will find it tethers you to a magical trick our spinning Earth plays for us each day; as we sleep Earth’s slow turns lull us into a blindness to the progress we are making. At times you will feel you must do eight more things before bed. But oddly, doing just one small thing, and then resting and returning to being a human, will move you ahead with greater consistency. Each day that you awaken, time’s little elves will have healed many small ills. Frantic action will not make things that feel bad feel better. Hacks like “slow” and “one thing” and ‘sleep eight hours” and “re-choose everything” do a better job of taking you where you want to go.
Where ever you are in the world, in time, and in your mind, remember: YOU ARE RESILIENT AF. Breathe. Feel your feet on the ground. Imagine with every step forward you are rebuilding, repainting, re-choosing, re-designing and re-filling your precious few remaining minutes with more important things. Cheers, cin-cin, and hugs. @MarySueIRL
