The Snow Globe

The last couple of weeks have meant a blessed break from work. My job has been very all-encompassing of late, since last June in fact when I was reluctantly promoted to a position of much greater leadership than I had ever imagined for myself. I have a very hard time keeping an emotional distance from my work, and the more responsibility I carry, the more tempting it is for me to become completely submerged within it. 

It is especially challenging for me to preserve my emotional boundaries when there is any kind of drama. I was reared on a steady diet of intense drama, and more importantly, made to believe it was my moral imperative to engage with it. Or more accurately, enmesh with it. 

I have made some progress during my 47 years of life, on my relationship to duty and my expectations for myself. But over the last several months the inevitable unfolding drama of a small non-profit has been testing those carefully built boundaries, and has found them out as the work of a novice. I have been running back and forth constantly plugging the cracks, and feeling the strain and weight of the water threatening to flood in.

It took me a few days off, and the sensation of space ahead in the holiday break, before I could really take a deep breath and return to myself. Think my own thoughts, wonder about my own self, connect with the world around me, imagine things for my future. And serendipitously in that moment, I came accross the book Hagitude by Sharon Blackie, in which she explores the neglected “second half of life” that I happen to be on the threshold of. 

Hagitude is not a book which addresses my challenges of work and boundaries, at least not directly. I read many such books which help me open up my dark closets, and carry forward my hard Inner Work. This book is not that, but rather an exciting hint of possibilities beyond which set my insides swirly. An inspiration perfectly timed for my moment of noticing myself. Oh yeah, I’m here. What is it that I wanted to do again? So many things! I feel like a snow globe given a spin. All the flakes of me which had long since settled, now a-flutter. 

I realized I hadn’t felt that movement and warmth in my belly in a long time. And I miss it.

I’ve been thinking about something a dear friend said years ago. It really stuck with me, feels like a key question to the meaning of life which I’ve returned to again and again. She asked, “How does a person balance the maintenance of life with any forward movement? I feel like I can only do one or the other. When I try to do anything interesting and new, all the daily tasks fall to pieces. And when I buckle down and get all the daily tasks done, forward movement just stagnates.”

It seems all living things function on these two basic responses: advance toward growth and withdraw toward safety. You can’t do them both at the same time and you can’t just settle for one or the other, you have to alternate between them wisely, read the room and divine when to do which. Read yourself and make a guess. 

These last several months, all of my ‘advance’ energy has been going in to my work, and I’m sure I have been growing (though honestly I can’t see it yet). But it means I don’t have any ‘advance’ energy left for my home, my family, myself. When I get home all I want to do is curl up in ‘withdraw’ mode. This break has been so luscious because it’s given me a bit of ‘advance’ energy for my very own. It’s made creative things feel exciting, and life feel full of possibilities again. 

Tomorrow I have to return to my job. I wonder if I will be able to carry any of this new-found space with me, or whether I’ll fall right back down under the wave. I’ve been trying to make plans and lists for how to cultivate my own best health through this hard time, how to nourish myself so that I have space for myself. And I guess that’s part of the challenge, part of the growth that’s inevitably marching forward— how to give myself a little room for movement in between all of the maintenance. Space for the flakes to swirl.