get over yourself

It’s a balmy 73 degrees in Santa Monica and stepping outside onto our deck feels like summer. This morning, my son tried to ask Alexa for the weather forecast: “Alexa, what the weader to be today?” Unfortunately, Alexa wasn’t able to translate toddler speak into a language it understands. It’s puzzling, though, because this weekend, he somehow managed to get Alexa to play music and untangled his headphones and plugged them into the back of the speaker by himself. We’re currently playing Norah Jones’s Sunrise on repeat. Eliot calls it the owl song because of the chorus “Hoo, ooh, hoo, ooh / Hoo, ooh, hoo, ooh” and I hope I’ll remember that about this time in my life until the day I die.

I’m sorry to say, but these are the things that matter to me now.

Admittedly, this life is little, by most accounts or points of comparison. But oh, how big and beautiful it is inside this little life. You really ought to see it for yourself.

A dear friend and I read The Power of Now together recently. We alternated texting each other exclamations of how thought-provoking it is.

We see ourselves and those around us differently now. There’s a tacit understanding that the world runs on the egoic mind, that delusions of grandeur are an irrevocable element of the human condition—and that all of it comes from insecurity. Compassion and grace are much more accessible when you accept that fundamental premise. We’re all compensating for some unloved part of ourselves. We’re all driven by the need to prove something, often to someone else. We’re all doing our best.

I heard somewhere about the practice of finding the sacred in the mundane. So much of motherhood, and perhaps of life, necessitates mundanity. Every morning, after my husband leaves to take my son to school, I put away their plates and wipe down the table. I wash the dishes by hand and try to let my mind rest. I’ve become grateful for this time I have, the luxury of tending gently to the tedious—to chop vegetables and peel apples, to do something real with my hands in an increasingly surreal world. I’m not convinced that there are better or worse ways to spend the time that we have, as long as it’s spent with care.

I’ve been very emotional lately. I’ve been crying almost every day. It’s okay though, because I love crying. I cry when I read pretty much anything online and I cry when someone dies in The Sopranos and I cried when I finished the book, Severance. None of it was about me. Not much really is. And isn’t that beautiful?