Tag: adapting

On New Shapes and Exercises in Normalcy

By Catherine DiMercurio

In this state of suspension, we are given conflicting orders. We are told don’t move and keep moving as much as possible. We are playing freeze tag. We are it for a moment, running frantically with purpose, then frozen and waiting once again.

We are told many things, about how we should feel about all this, what we should and should not be doing, how we should and should not react. How can our responses to this “information” overload be anything but mercurial?

We fall back into what is familiar to us as a way of coping. We want to reach out to those who give us comfort, though our access to them may be limited, and they are going through the same thing, so it almost doesn’t seem fair anyway.

Sometimes I am fighting the feeling of shutting down, of retreating inwardly until it’s over. Except that I know that returning to self, from self, is a scary climb out of darkness sometimes and I don’t want to do that anymore or again or ever so I’m really trying, as we all are, each in our own way, to stay present, hopeful, aware and connected.

Sometimes I am feeling immersed in a task or a conversation or a thought and for a moment, or a handful of them, the world is relatively normal, and I breathe deeply and hold it, trying to keep it.

Sometimes I am talking on the phone feeling at once that all is well, and that hovering at the edges of the bubble is the dark strangeness, waiting to seep back in.

ball ball shaped blur bubble
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The most important relationships in our lives are all being pushed and pulled into new directions, new shapes, and each one of them is being explored and navigated differently, carefully, and we are uncertain about what we are getting right and what we are getting wrong.

Sometimes I am very much aware that a specific conservation of energy is happening within me.

When my children were in elementary school, we participated in a fundraiser in which we bought caterpillars that we housed in homemade shelters outfitted with the necessities. A small branch upon which to build a chrysalis. Some sort of food, I don’t remember what. One year we released two butterflies. Another year, one butterfly emerged from its chrysalis with a malformed wing. Sometimes it feels like we are all busy mis-shaping part of ourselves as we try to adapt to what our world has become, all the while, hoping we’ll emerge properly.

If we emerge newly malformed, it will be into a world that’s similarly altered, and we will fit one another, us and the world.

What I am discovering, perhaps just in this moment, that it is maybe best to not call it anything. Maybe it is best to not define it, to just have it be whatever it is on any given day, and to continue. To do the work of the day, whatever it may be, and be done with it.

I have found that I function better when counting on some version of the plans I’d been making. Timelines shift, the contours morph, but still, there is forward, next, soon. Though it all might be tenderly misshapen. Though we were all frozen too long, or it too long, the game of tag prolonged indefinitely. We are not being called in to dinner, or waiting for the streetlights to come on, our cue to go home.

Now there is only home. And it doesn’t mean quite what it used to. It’s not its fault.

We want so badly to not be balancing quite so precariously, on the edge of how things were, and the unknown of how they will be, how we will be. How will we be? But maybe we were always precariously balanced and we just didn’t know it.

There are no fresh insights here, just me poking around at perspectives, trying to find the best one to fit my current state of mind. I think, what is the point of writing this anyway. I think of the little butterfly, awkwardly flying as if she had the hiccups, and the great tenderness I felt toward this not-okay little creature, and I think that maybe that is the perspective that fits me today.

It helps me to think of the constants. Spring was on its way when this all started and is decidedly here now. The forsythia is an effulgent yellow, tight lilac buds are preparing to bloom once the forsythia tires from showing off. The grass is greening with each rainfall. The chubby robins chipped me awake earlier and I’m here, taking it all in. The fresh lush truth of spring. This is hard. We are lonely. We are missing each other. We are counting down the days. I am.

I cannot craft this into something cohesive. It is, if nothing else, an exercise in normalcy. It is the way I interact with ambiguity. I’m exploring the odd new way of things and trying to land on a way of being for right now, and I have great tenderness for our new shapes.

Love, Cath

 

On Scattered Things and Rabbit Holes

By Catherine DiMercurio

These days, I collect moments. We had coffee in bed. I couldn’t name the bird singing outside as the sun was rising. I found myself becoming aware of all the details at once. The unnamed birds (somehow wilder because I didn’t know what to call them) and the tightness of the red tree buds and the morning light on our faces and the scattered and speckled pattern the coffee made on the white sheet where I spilled it.

And this: that day, was it only earlier this week? and the warm fog of my dog’s breath in the morning air when I, after days of saying I need to go for a walk, went for a walk. And it had just snowed and the flakes were thick and damp and insisting on themselves as they settled on my face and on the black spots of my dog’s coat, making much ado as they rained down on warm March sidewalks before they disappeared.

Another walk, a few days later, and it suddenly feels like spring. Another walk, trying to beat the rain, and failing at that. Arriving home, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I’m washing my hands and I see the pattern the warm raindrops made on my skin, like something spilled and scattered.

I insist on noticing the ordinary things these days, and I can’t tell if it is to keep the confusion of the world out and a semblance of peace in, or to let the chaos in my brain out and the tiny fragments of life as we knew it in. It is a permeable membrane maybe, this fragile sheen of sought normalcy. I soak beans for soup. I fold the laundry. I hum while I wash dishes.

Maybe the insistence (that normal activity exists not just in the world as we knew it but as it is now) is the result of our brain’s worrying us away from the rabbit holes of news, social media, statistics, exponential growth graphs. I think of rabbit holes, and Alice, her miscellany of sense and nonsense, the way she sought to match known world to new. Adapting.

I think, too, that rabbit holes work just fine for rabbits, and if I could only think like one maybe it would be okay down here, cozy like the little home where Peter Rabbit’s mother tucked him in bed with chamomile tea when he wasn’t feeling well.

two brown rabbits
Photo by Jim Long on Pexels.com

What is the overlap between known and new? Is it simply the unfolding of ordinary moments, of insisting on them?

I think of the things we forget to insist on when we scramble to adapt to the upending of everything.

These days, I don’t just collect moments. I work, and I try to box up worry and stuff it in a corner, lock it up with luck. I’m lucky; I have work I can do at home. I’m lucky; we’re still healthy. I hum loudly with my fingers in my ears as if it can keep luck from running out. I work, but it is hard to focus. Deadlines clang in the distance like the tardy bell at school half a mile away and I remember how I heard it on the first day that school was cancelled and I don’t hear it any more, but maybe I just stopped noticing.

These days, I’m perpetually calibrating, trying to tune my psychological and emotional response to the day, moment, beat. Sometimes it’s all static.

Like anyone these days, I don’t know what to think, and coping looks different all the time. More information. Less information. Different information. Silence. Noise. Coffee. Music. Breath. I like to look at faces, sometimes longer than people like to be looked at.

It’s impossible to stop myself from thinking of how quickly things have changed, how immediately so many plans we had for ourselves seem to have unraveled. But we are nothing if not weavers, and we routinely loop things back together and of course we will do so again. Rebraid the frayed strands, remake our plans, create new ones. Adapt.

A friend reminded me recently that our days are filled with choices, though things seem limited now, constrained and boundaried in ways we weren’t able to imagine just a couple of weeks ago. We choose moment by moment to be hopeful, to proceed, to connect, to insist.

I try to read a little poetry every day. To keep writing. To keep up with the home improvements that need to be done before I can sell my house. Though plans everywhere are collectively paused, we know they won’t stay that way. Timelines might have to be reimagined, details tweaked, but we will move forward, individually and collectively. It’s what we do, what we are doing. Inch by inch. Choice by choice. Coffee by coffee, poem by poem, word by word, walk by walk. Breath by breath.

I’m trying to see something of value in the scatter of my thoughts here. I feel like I have tried to organize a few stones on the beach into little cairns, but having failed, stare at the jumble of them and stop searching for sense. Isn’t that how Alice began to navigate Wonderland? Wasn’t it easier when she stopped expecting sense? Though innately, we do keep trying.

I think of scattered things, birdseed that ends up taking root, crumbs carried away by squirrels, coffee grounds across the garden soil. Things have a way of working out, I suppose, of rooting like seeds, or nurturing in unexpected ways like the crumbs from my bread or the grounds from my coffee.

Things have a way of connecting us to other, like all those tunnels in a rabbit warren. It makes sense to rabbits. They know where safety is, and what to look for, and when, and there is comfort in that, and beauty, too. We just have to look for it, adapt. We become curiouser and curiouser.

Love, Cath