Lessons in Learning How to Rest, Part Eleven.

Lesson Eleven: Going All In

This City Girl's inner monologue often sounds like Zach Braff's character from Scrubs and usually leads into a far-fetched daydream that ends with a choir singing out the days thoughts. (Oh, how I wish I was kidding.) However, earlier this week there was a plain and simple conversation in this Girl's head that looked a lot like this:

Lesson Nine*...know your season. Hmph. I'm clearly still in the same process I was when I posted that lesson back in January. JANUARY!!!...I guess I can see it's definitely been a process. I feel like a totally different person from the girl who wrote that post months ago and I know I'm definitely NOT still at the starting line, but seriously....when is this time going to be over?? This feels like waterboarding. (insert whiny noises and groaning) There's gotta be a way to make this go faster...Can I truly say that I've been in this, like, really in this? Hmm....why do I get the feeling there's more I could be doing here? (insert additional groans)

So, Lesson Eleven readers, I say this with as much bravery as I can muster: This City Girl has decided to push all her chips to the middle. Into the innermost depths of a difficult time. Into the very hardest of all situations, bearing down and leaning in. All in hopes that it will make this time, this season of learning, somehow go faster. This City Girl will let the lungs of her heart take in as much of the ethereal water as they can hold in hopes that she will come out on the other side of this season a better Girl. A stronger Girl. A Girl with answers. A Girl with greater hope.

Today I am going all in.

* The answer is yes. My thought process does include url links. (wink)

Don't Be A Hater

Ok, kids, this is just getting weird. I love a good random moment. I mean, c'mon, who doesn't?! But the number of random moments that have crowded my days lately is just astounding. And let me just say this: It usually takes me a solid day or two before those random moments actually register. So, it seems like every two days I am reliving all those random moments over and over again aside from all the new random moments that keep crashing into my daily life.

Let's review what just happened this morning. Mmkay?

I went to one of my favorite coffee shops this morning where I ran into some friends having coffee. The plan was to sit my tucas down and pound out some much needed design work for my new website, but instead ended up getting roped into a ridiculously long catch up/chatty cathy session. Meanwhile, a 78 year old woman (never mind how I found out that little nugget of info...) sat at the table next to us, every once in awhile chiming into our conversation, while she was waiting for her friend to show up. I was starting to think that her "friend" was never coming and that maybe she was just a lonely old soul with nowhere to go and nothing to do. But minutes later her imaginary friend appeared and soon after the three of us started packing up our things to head to lunch. Just as we started to step away from the table the old woman stopped me and told me not to give up on love. Mind you, we hadn't talked about relationships while she was there. In fact, the only time we talked about relationships was to rehash our friends past and now current relationship with a fabulous woman I haven't met, but already adore. A conversation for which she was not present.

Even typing out those very words now makes my breath catch in my chest and my eyes well up with tears. Who was that strange woman? And how did she know what had been circling round my brain and reverberating through my very being? I haven't exactly thrown in the towel on love, but I have definitely made it clear to friends who are eager to play matchmaker that my heart needs a break. Not to mention, I flippantly made a comment the other night that has clearly been owning my subconscious that basically implied I believe all my future relationships will end in ruin.

I haven't gone all out and become some sort of asexual being or tried to join a nunnery, but I may as well have tattooed the words "Love Hater" on my chest since my latest break up session. And I still can't say just how that 78 year old woman knew my story, but she said exactly what this City Girl needed to hear.

Hopelessly devoted.

hope /hōp/ :A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. The feeling that what is wanted can be had.

Hope is a funny thing. It's not an emotion. It's not tangible. It's nothing you can wrap your arms around. It's not a place. It's not a person. It's a feeling. An inkling. A special hunch that can swarm your heart and fuel your desires. It can be a strong driving force in your life. It can show up from the earliest of ages and stick with you for an eternity. And if you're not careful, it can get left behind, dumped and forsaken without your noticing.

I cried tonight. In a restaurant. Into my empty sushi plate. And it would have been embarrassing if I wasn't so emotionally exhausted. The past two years of my life haven't been a struggle. They've been a constant attempt at walking through a pit of quicksand. In case you've never seen an Indiana Jones movie, the quicksand always wins.

I couldn't tell you the exact moment I let hope slip through my fingers, but I could point to my own personal timeline and identify when my life started to fall apart and my heart and mind both decided to abandon the hope ship. It was right around the time that I had fallen hard in love with someone who woke up one morning and decided he wanted to take back all the sweet and wonderful things he had said the night before and no longer wanted to be the light in my eyes. That was also around the time that I decided to move away from all my friends and everything familiar to go back home. For what I had no idea. But as soon as I did family members started to die off. And by the end of the year I was let go from a job I had had for the past 3 years and was hoping would stay with me through my next move. In less than 12 months, I had gone from absolute bliss and ecstasy to a sad and angry mess.

Fast forward a couple years and you'll find a girl who went from sad, angry, and later bitter, to hopeless and constantly waiting for that illusive rug to be pulled out from under her. I had moved past the anger and bitterness and went straight into disbelief that anything good would ever happen to me. I had come to expect that life was supposed to fall apart. In short, good things only happen in the movies.

Fast forward a little more to the present day and you'll find a girl choking back crocodile sized tears, mid-conversation, in a sushi restaurant, because her friend just hit the nail on the head. He had just defined all her problems with one word: hope. I hadn't lost hope. I had abandoned it. I left it back in the shower of my old apartment where I cried my eyes out over a lover lost. I had left it in those moving boxes that held all my possessions between here and there. I had washed my hands of hope when all those good things that were supposed to happen didn't.

Ah, hindsight with it's perfect vision...

It's a scary move to make, going from hopelessness to belief. Hope reminds me of the feeling I had as a kid standing on Main Street in Disneyland. Everything was magical and all things were possible. As an adult it's terrifying to put yourself in a position of belief, because the let-down can be agonizing. But here I am, at one o'clock in the morning, typing out tonight's events and hoping.