This time of year, my unofficial job as a therapist is to help people survive the holidays. Though I’m not (yet) an experienced rock climber, I love the analogy of finding new handholds that help me hang on when I feel lonely, untethered and lost in what feels like should be my closest relationships. In the past two weeks, I’ve gone searching for anchors and solidness to help me hang on as I welcome my college-aged kids home after my first months empty nesting, integrate a step-sister I was estranged from for years back into my life, and figure out how to resource my kids as their dad gets remarried next week—their first big life event I won’t be a part of. Here are some of the words and ideas I’m clinging to this Thanksgiving season in case you also find yourself in precarious emotional territory and need places that can bear some of the weight you are carrying.
Wise rock climbing advice from REI:
“Focus on the direction you want to pull. To get the strongest and easiest grip, pull perpendicular to the hold. Line your weight up with that direction of pull and you'll be less likely to come off the rock.” (watch the full video for more fascinating resilience analogies!)
Beautiful lines from a few of my (current) favorite Mary Oliver poems:
“Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.”
“all those rows of seeds —each one a new life! —hope for a deeper acquaintance; each of them, though it stands in a crowd of many, like a separate universe, is lonely, the long work of turning their lives into a celebration is not easy.”
From David Whyte’s book Consolations, an excerpt from his beautiful prose piece called Longing:
“Longing is nothing without it’s dangerous edge, that cuts and wounds us while setting us free and beckons us exactly because of the human need to invite the right kind of peril. The foundational instinct that we are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world, that we are a form of invitation to others and to other-ness, that we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing…”
Finally, I’m halfway through Tracey Gee’s fabulous book The Magic of Knowing What You Want and I keep coming back to this amazing sentence:
“Abundance does not need certainty to exist.”