This Is It
Summer is Here and We're All Going Crazy
*Update: Happy summer everyone! It’s official, we have reached our “summer crazies” over here. Preschool is over and summer camp has begun. We have camping trips planned and are taking our raft out on more rivers. Yay! With that said, my schedule is more chaotic now and I may not be able to publish every other Thursday through the summer, but I will keep getting writing out at least monthly until the fall. Good luck with summer everyone! Try not to go too crazy and let’s remember to slow down and take good care of ourselves.
No shit, there I was, on the side of the freeway in the backseat of my husband’s truck yelling, “Stop yelling!” at our 2 screaming babies. The 5-year-old had to pee, as it turned out, and in the midst of his wining and complaining, he woke up the napping baby, who started shrieking while we drove 70 miles-an-hour down the freeway. We were heading home a day early, from an exhausting family camp out. I climbed into the backseat, in the middle of the chaos, and then I lost it. My husband pulled the car over on the side of the freeway, got the 5-year-old out for a heart-to-heart and to pee. I scooped the baby out to breastfeed and we all calmed down a bit. Then we drove on silently for a while until I turned to my husband and asked, “Do you think we’ll laugh about this one day?” He said, “Yes, definitely. Next week.”
I keep thinking about this comic that I saw years ago in the newspaper. The picture is two Buddhist monks sitting next to each other in meditation. One turns to the other and says, “What happens next?” The other one answers, “This is it.” This image keeps popping up for me in the midst of my life. It started one night sitting around our table outside on the deck for a kid-dinner at 5pm. Everything about the scene was perfectly nice, with my beautiful boys and my handsome husband. Still I had this sense of dissatisfaction. Wanting more, I thought, “Is this it?” Then I thought of the comic and this little voice popped up and whispered, “Yes, this is it.” Is it still “it” when we’re all screaming in the backseat on the freeway? Yes, this is still my life, happening right now.
Somehow this makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. It feels both disappointing and comforting, the “This is it-ness” of everything. I keep reminding myself, especially in the moments of yearning for something more, something different that, “This is it too.” My life is beautiful, in sort of a mundane boring kind of way. I’m married to a kind sexy man, my boys are healthy and happy. We have a lovely home with plenty of food.
And yet, there’s this part of me that yearns to be wild and free. To climb mountains and take boats over waterfalls being consumed totally by freezing cold water that bathes me and wakes me up to my life. I miss flying to exotic lands by myself on a whim, just for fun, to explore and taste spicy new flavors. At the same time my boring little life is really nice. We still adventure but our adventures are mostly smaller than they used to be, kid friendly. I spend a lot of time getting down low and looking closely at bugs, leaves, and flowers.
A lot of my life now is the adventure of noticing all the little things. The adventure of hoping we sleep through the night. The adventure of riding the waves of toddler tantrums. And it’s beautiful. My goal for the summer is to keep coming back to the “this is it-ness” of the present moment. Especially when I’m wanting something different. Like when I’m driving to meditation right after I get my boys to sleep and wishing that I had more time and could bike because it’s so beautiful out (like last week). And my mind wonders, “Is this it?” The answer is “Yes, this is it too. And this and this and this.”
Accepting my life as it constantly changes. Radical acceptance. This is the practice. Over and over again. In order to do this I have to remember to slow down so that my soul can catch up to my body. So that I can remember to appreciate all the little things and not miss it in the striving, in the planning. In the wanting things to be different. Wanting the kids to be older so that we have more freedom so that we can take them on bigger adventures. This is all it.