+ I’ve been away from Adulting – Second Half for a little bit, because I was on a trip with my husband. The highlight of the trip was hiking in Zion National Park in Utah. Since our children have grown up, my husband and I have taken advantage of traveling during off-season times, in order to escape crowds and exorbitant prices and long lines at restaurants. I couldn’t recommend going to Zion in February more to anyone. It was delightful and other-worldly and people-ly enough to not feel deserted, but allowing for plenty of personal space to be able to totally take in (and soak in) such incredible, gorgeous nature and scenery. During the spring and summer, Zion is one of the most visited of our national parks and you aren’t even allowed to drive through it. You are required to take shuttles from stop to stop. But in February, you can drive even the most famous Canyon Scenic Drive, and stop as often as you wish to saturate in the beauty of just one tiny, miraculous part our great country/world. If you do choose to go to Zion National Park in the winter, be sure to purchase some crampons for your hiking boots. For those of you like me, who had never heard of “crampons” before, “crampons” is the unfortunate name for stainless steel spikes on rubber bands that you stretch over the bottom of your boots (boots! – not tennis shoes. The people wearing tennis shoes on even the most level of trails were slip-sliding all over the place, as there was plenty of ice and snow and loose rocks on the trails, particularly at the higher elevations. Many of these hikers seemed to be in exasperated peril on the more difficult trails and often expressed deep envy, and some were even desperate enough to offer to purchase our crampons at well-over market prices.) I only purchased our crampons last minute on Amazon (for $25 a set) because I was lucky enough to land on a Reddit thread about Zion where one redditor insisted that you need them. (Thank you, thank you, thank you, dear sweet anonymous redditor! You saved our butts and made us look like total “in-the-know” badasses, as my husband and I, confident as sure-footed mountain goats, strolled past many hikers in their Nikes sliding down the mountain.) The crampons made me feel so confident and sure-footed, on even the most strenuous of our hikes, that I played around with the idea of wearing them every single day, for the rest of my life.
+ Do you ever feel like you are getting clear messages of affirmation from Source/God/Universe that you are on the right path and making the right decisions for yourself? I’ve had that experience this morning. Early this year, I declared to myself and also to my closest family and friends, that I was going to be very attuned to my own needs this year. I asked my loved ones to not personalize me and my choices, because I am choosing to honor that this is an incredibly momentous year for our family, and there are a lot of “feels” that come with this fact. Two of our four adult children are getting married, and our youngest child and our only daughter, is graduating from college and moving to a whole other time zone for a great job opportunity, all in the span of a few months. I feel such a mixy soup of emotions about all of this, ranging from pure joy and ecstasy and pride, to fear and nostalgia and even shock that we are at this stage of our family’s journey. I tend to feel my feels big-ly and deeply and so I must honor and respect my own need for self-care. For me, self-care means that I need a lot of solitude and my structured routine and good sleep and nurturance. For me, self-care means that my boundaries will be firmer than ever, so that I am able to give myself the space for reflection and prayer and processing and feeling. However, being a woman and being a giver/pleaser by nature, this declaration hasn’t come without its own set of emotions, like guilt and vulnerability and fear of rejection and anger from others. So this morning, unrelated to that fact, I started reading random various articles that interested me. The first article was written about Alysa Liu, the Olympic Gold medalist in figure skating, who only recently came out of retirement from competitive skating, after taking time to work on her mental health, in order to better get to know herself outside of figure skating, and to understand her own dreams and visions. ” . . . here is someone who will not comply, who has found her own ebullient, levitating, and self-approving form,” is how The Atlantic describes Alysa. After going through crazy times in her skating career, such as when she was told to not drink water, for fear of gaining water weight, Alysa decided to retire from skating for a bit and to reflect on what she wanted skating to be in her life. “Speaking on her new competitive figure skating mindset, Liu said, “I lived a lot. [I did] everything I possibly could… When I quit, a lot of the toxicity I had attached to skating just, boom, disappeared… When I was a kid, so many people told me who I was and who I wanted to be—there was so much projection. I didn’t have a chance to explore myself, my brain, or my hobbies, but now I have, so I’m feeling really grounded in who I am… When you get older, you can control so much of your life. It’s so much better.” – from an interview with Elle magazine. I watched Alysa Liu’s gold medal winning routine this morning and I immediately understood why she won, besides the physical perfection of it all. When Alysa was skating, she was the epitome of pure joy in the moment. She was embracing and loving every moment on the ice. You could see it on Alysa’s face. You could vicariously feel it. In that moment, Alysa wasn’t skating for a medal, or for approval, or proof of a “comeback.” She was skating in pure alignment with her soul. And the reason why we all identify with that moment is because deep down, we know that we all have those moments in our lives when we know that we are in alignment with our souls and our purposes and there is no better, more reassuring, more alive feeling in the world. She showed us the undeniable physical proof of this and it resonated. After that, I read a compelling essay written by a writer named Nate Postlethwait whose writing I admire, as to why he was choosing to quit all of his social media (in which he had amassed hundreds of thousands of followers) and to focus on only writing on his Substack. “I am taking my life back. I wish I had done this sooner,” he writes. Nate talks about being harrassed by strangers, getting awful anonymous mail, and expectations to address situations which he didn’t feel prepared to, nor interested in addressing. All of the joy that he got from writing and creating was getting sucked away, and he started feeling isolated, misunderstood and even paranoid. “I made the decision to leave social media in October. I made the decision to start writing on Substack around that time, because writing is a creative force for me, and I love doing this work . . . I just need it to be done in a way that supports me as well,” Nate writes in his essay. “I am grateful I am listening. I am grateful I am finally, after all these years, trusting myself to be the gentle guide I have been to others to myself. I have stories to tell, and I have ways I want to tell them where they feel human without being filtered.”
Both of these talented people have chosen to whittle down everything else in order to focus on the individual creative forces that drive them. (Alysa Liu considers skating to be her artistic expression.) Both of these talented people have chosen to remove “the noise” and to be fully in tune with the expressions of their own individual souls. Reading these articles this morning, I felt an affirmation from my Source that I am on the right path for myself. I believe Source was speaking to me in the words of others: ” . . . [find your] own ebullient, levitating, and self-approving form. . . . explore myself, my brain, or my hobbies . . . [get to] feeling really grounded in who I am…I am grateful I am finally, after all these years, trusting myself to be the gentle guide I have been to others to myself.” Perhaps if you are reading these words (and maybe even reading them again), your Source/soul is speaking to you, as well. Perhaps if these words feel resonant, like a personal message or a golden permission slip from the Universe, that’s what they really are meant to be for you, too. Please ponder this. The world would be a better place if everyone was truer to themselves, away from all of the distractions and false expectations and noise.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.