by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Time has been holding my hand these last few weeks.
Not in the way of an intimate friend, but in the way of an impatient parent trying to drag a slow-to-get-ready-child out the door so they won’t be late.
It’s not the last stage of pregnancy that makes me feel so brittle and bruised. Not really. It’s the birthday coming up that I don’t want to mark, because I don’t like marking my climbing age anymore.
I know I can’t possibly always have seen birthdays like this, because I was a really young child once, and every really young child dreams of growing up someday. But for as long as I can remember, I have hated growig older.
It’s not the birthdays, exactly. It’s their number, the way they creep around every year, the way they whisper things like time is running out and you haven’t done enough with the years you’ve been given and you should be further along the writer path than you are today.
Birthdays, for a long time now, have looked down on me in disappointment, tallying up those years and stretching their hand across all my past, as if to say, This is all there is?
Yes. This is all there is. I wanted it to be more, but time was never exactly kind, and days rushed toward dark, and weeks ran toward months, and whole years, when I didn’t really know what I was doing or where I was going or who I even was, slipped right through my fingers.
///
I don’t know exactly when those birthdays began breathing down my neck. Maybe it was the ninth one, when I blew out candles on a ballerina cake my mother had ordered before an instructor told me I was too “chunky” to continue lessons with her; a day when my friends and family all surrounded me except for the one who had missed so many other days like this one; a day when “chunky” got all tangled up around “gone;” a day when I used my wish to say, Let him come home. Or maybe it was the twelfth one, when I stood on our front porch waiting for my whole invited class to show up and only a few did; a day when there was no call or note or card from the missing one; a day when there were no candles to wish upon, because I was too old or maybe she was too strapped; a day when I still made my wish on the first star in the sky: I wish I could be pretty so he would come home.
Or maybe it was the twenty-fifth one, when I had just quit a dream-come-true newspaper job to follow my husband on a church-planting adventure, a day when I decided I would spend my time writing, a day when I peed on a stick and it said yes, a day when I still made my wish on the candles my husband lined up on a cake he’d made himself: I wish I could publish a book.
Maybe it was all of them, because a tenth birthday came around, and he did not come home; and a thirteenth birthday came around, and my beauty, or lack of it, did not bring him home; and a twenty-sixth birthday came around, and I had not published a book.
Birthdays did not feel like friends at all, even to a 9-year-old girl. They felt like fingers pointing to all the ways I had disappointed time.
///
I wish I could say it’s different this time around, but it’s not. The day after my birthday this year, my job will end. It’s the first time I have never worked for someone else. All that space feels more like an expectation, not a possibility. It’s hard to explain, except by saying this: there is a birthday climbing on my back and whispering in my ear, Another year older, and what have you done?
The answer is not much, and so this birthday takes my words and cackles and throws all those other years, when wishes didn’t come true, right back in my face. So when my husband asks if I want to celebrate with friends and family, I say no. Who wants to mark another year gone when there is nothing to show for it?
No published book, still. No job. Not even a family that is “put together” and “doing it” and functioning past the overwhelm that raises tempers and flings at each other words we don’t really mean.
Only an aching back, because kids have pulled all the joints out of whack. Only anxiety that still claws at a neck, even though we’re practicing meditation and exercising and learning to change our thoughts and I’m even popping a pill every day. Only a collection of dreams and wishes that never came true.
///
When I was 8 years old I saw the movie The Goonies (still one of the best movies of all time), and I remember how, for days, I dreamt about all those skeletons. I would sit in the bathtub, and my mom would come check on me, and I would see a skeleton walking through the door. My little sister would be fast asleep in her bed when I came in, and I would see a skeleton lying between the pink sheet and the purple-striped blanket. I would imagine my dad, wherever he was in the world, slumped in a corner, in skeleton form, looking like One-Eyed-Willie, without the treasure waiting on a lost ship.
What I’d seen in a childhood movie had thrown reality at me, proven that one day we would all die, and one day we would all turn to skeletons like the ones Mikey and Bran and Mouth ran into. Death terrified me, because it looked like those brittle bones; sometimes it looked even scarier, like the wax figures lying in a casket. Neither one was what I wanted to be.
When I imagined getting older, I imagined death.
And just like that, a little girl broke off what should be a happy relationship with her birthday. She didn’t want to grow up. She didn’t want to get any older. She didn’t want to die.
///
So, you see, getting older has never been exactly easy for me. I was never the girl who couldn’t wait until she turned 10 or 16 or 21, because every one of those years felt like a step closer to death. And even this week, when another birthday has come and gone, it passed with more dread than excitement.
It’s silly, when we get down to the heart of it, that we fear getting older. We, especially women, can feel time ticking so loudly—this many years until I can no longer have a baby, this many years until my hair turns all gray, this many years until they will no longer think of me as “young.”
What does it really matter?
There is a great gift in getting older, too, a wisdom that begins to settle into our bones when we realize that life is not really about these little things—having a job or not, publishing a book or not, making a name for ourselves or not. Life is really about who we become in all these years. Who we become in our families and in our communities and in our selves.
Will we become people who believe accomplishment and accolades and just-right circumstances tell the whole story of who we are? Or will we become people who believe that our true worth is really tied to who we were created to be, who we already are when we peel away all the layers a world can wrap us in?
We are all born with a diamond down deep inside us, and the diamond is brilliant and visible for a time, and then the world covers it in a great heap of armor, and then we spend the rest of our years trying to uncover it again so we can see and know and believe the treasure we already are, without the qualifications and accomplishments tagging behind our name. And if getting older means uncovering more of that brilliance, one shovelful at a time, then I want to embrace age. Wisdom. Maturity.
So this year, on my day, I didn’t check for more gray hairs and moan about the wrinkles that have begun to gather around the corners of my eyes from smiling too much at my boys. I looked, instead, toward the gift that time holds out to me every single birthday: one more chunk of a diamond revealed.
And then I whispered my wish.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Recently I talked with a group of third- and fifth-graders about how to cultivate creativity in a young life, and one of the first questions they asked me was this one: Who were your biggest influences when you were a kid?
I hadn’t pre-prepared for any of the questions they asked me, even though I should have known they would come. Kids are curious about what (and who) shapes adults to become who they are. And there were so many influences along my journey—but what they all had in common was that they were authors. This is because, even as a child, I was a reader. A writer. A girl who knew what I wanted to be before I ever had a clue what it meant to be grown up.
During a recent year of writing poetry based off the words of famous writers, artists, and influential people, I stumbled across this quote from Francois Mauriac, a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist: “Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are is true enough, but I’d know better if you told me what you re-read.”
These words ring true in my life.
There are so many good things to read. I read mostly middle grade fiction, more young adult fiction recently. I read a poem a day from various poets. I read some adult literature, but not much. I read the classics.
What I re-read is a much smaller list, but it points to who I am. The most re-read book on my shelf is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, followed closely by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Rilke’s collected poetry, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, everything Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison have written, and Katherine Applegate’s Home of the Brave and The One and Only Ivan.
Though we rarely recognize it, books shape us into who we are. We spend hours, days, sometimes even weeks with them, and we are always changed by the end of them. And the ones we re-read change us even more.
Books offer us new ideas, tell us who we might be, open us to the lives of other people who are different than we are.
They show us a way forward. They prove that we can overcome, we can do better, we are made to be heroes of whatever story we’re living. They remind us that this—the shadow we’re wrestling with right now—is not the end of the story.
These are all the things I love most about books.
So as we begin a new year, I want to encourage you to find more time to pick up those books stacked on your shelf. Sort through the list you’ve been keeping in the back of your mind. Read one more book a month than you did last year.
And then re-read it. Let it teach you fully what it has to say.
I’ll be doing the same.
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by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s just a tiny thing, oval and white and smaller than the vitamins I swallow every single day, but I leave it on my desk and stare at it.
It’s not the enemy. The panic-lump in my throat is the enemy, and this pill could help. I know this. But still I can’t bring myself to touch it.
More than a week ago, my doctor called in a prescription for some of the symptoms I rattled off with an apologetic laugh—lump in my throat, difficulty breathing through some of my thoughts, constant worry—and assured me I was not alone, not even close, because so many people have to take these medications at one time or another.
Yes, but this is me, I thought.
This is me, and I don’t take medication to make myself feel better, because I have faith and prayer and meditation and mindfulness and hope and joy and gratitude and love and family and Jesus.
So I let it sit on the pharmacy pick-up shelf long enough for them to restock it, like it didn’t belong to anybody in particular, and then I finally drove to the pharmacy to pick it up and a man said he could have it ready in another twenty-four hours because he’d need to fill the prescription all over again. I waited another three days and then sent my husband to pick it up, because I could not face the eyes that would see, notice, judge this woman who needed a pill to feel normal.
Two days it sat on the dresser in my bedroom, waiting, and then, today, when that lump made it hard to breathe, I took one pill out and turned it over in my hands and then let it clink back down to the bottom of an orange bottle.
I can’t do it. I can’t swallow this pill, because I can find my way out of this. I can. There is nothing wrong with me.
And if there were, what would they all think?
///
When I was eight years old, my teacher noticed I was squinting to read the words on the overhead projector, and then I was squinting at my neighbor’s page to copy her notes instead of bothering with the screen at all, and then I was holding multiplication flashcards and books and worksheets too close to my face for comfort. So she told my mom, who talked to the school nurse, who talked to my teacher and arranged an appointment to check my eyes.
It was a tumultuous time in my life then, because I hadn’t seen my father for a year, and those absences explained by an out-of-state job that paid more money than he could possibly make in our little town stretched longer and longer every time he came home and left again. And somehow, in my little-girl mind, my father’s absences had become tangled around my perfection or imperfection. Somehow it all depended on me.
Somehow I had to be perfect, and that would bring him home and keep him there for good.
But now something was wrong with my eyes. I knew it before they told me, and I didn’t want anyone else to know. I especially didn’t want my father to know.
I cried all the way to the nurse’s office, because I knew what this appointment would show. I cried standing in front of an illuminated screen, with a little plastic spatula over my left eye, not even able to read the one big lone letter at the top. I cried all the way back out, because my eyes had failed me.
I would never be perfect, and, to an 8-year-old, that meant my father would never come home.
///
I looked for all the reasons not to take that pill. I called my doctor to ask if it was really safe, because I’m a person drawn almost obsessively to natural remedies, avoidant of all toxins, and I’ve never had this problem before and I don’t like medication and there has to be another way, and why isn’t this anxiety going away on its own when I’m praying and meditating and working out my salvation and doing everything I’m supposed to do?
What is the source of your anxiety? she said.
So much sits like five-ton weights on my neck and chest and head and feet that drag slow steps through the halls of my home and hands that hold too tightly to control whatever I can control.
I name all the things that flash at random. Work. Kids. Home. Chores. Life.
That’s as far as I get, even though I could name money and bills and single-car family and my appearance and my sons, particularly the one struggling with his own depression, and sleep and marriage, too. She interrupts my list and says, Sometimes we just need help.
Right before we hang up, she says, Take care of yourself.
OK, I say, even though what I really mean is, I’ll try, because I don’t know if taking care of myself is popping a pill or letting it sit with the other 59 of them in a bottle that tells me to swallow one twice a day.
It’s another mark of imperfection, this failure of my mind and emotions.
And I don’t want anyone to know.
///
My junior high school was eleven miles from the house I grew up in, so I had to ride a bus for an hour every day to get there and back.
In seventh grade I played volleyball and basketball and ran track and sat first-chair clarinet, and every afternoon one or all of these activities had practices I attended, and at the end of those practices, all of us who lived too far away to walk a highway home packed up into a bus and rode it to a drop-off spot where parents waited for pick-up.
There was an evening when I stepped off the bus at 6:30 p.m., just like I did every other weeknight, and I did not see my mom’s gray Ford Escort.
The drop-off point was an old post office, where, years before, when we’d lived in another house just down the way, we’d been walking our dog to check the mail and a car going too fast hit our dog, named Chance for his good luck thus far, so hard he spun circles in the middle of the road running between our house and the post office that closed every day at 4.
This particular evening, I sat staring at that same highway, thinking of all the things that could have happened to my mom. Seeing my spinning dog in the middle of the highway, replaced by her tail-spinning car.
I tried to shake off the fears, but what if she’d had an accident coming here to pick me up? What if she was dead? What if it was my fault? Who would the three of us, my brother and sister and me, live with, since we hadn’t heard from or seen our dad in three years?
I finally decided I’d walk the eight miles home when my mom pulled into the drive, fifteen-minutes-that-felt-like-fifteen-hours late. The gravel spun under the tires as she came to a stop, and I coughed on the dust, or maybe the emotion, and got in.
I stared out the car window, all the way home, trying not to cry as my leftover fears tripped down the highway behind us.
///
I stare out another car window now, trying not to cry, because I don’t want my husband or my sons to see just how fragile I feel.
We’re on our way to lead worship to a group of teenagers, and I feel like a fraud. We will sing about not being afraid and walking on deep waters with faith ready to be stretched, and here I am sinking in the rip tide of anxiety and fear.
I try to work out some of my feelings with my husband on the way. He tells me I should attempt to put our problems in perspective by considering others’ problems. At least we’re not homeless, he says. At least we have healthy food in our refrigerator. At least none of our children are terminally ill.
The rock of anxiety shifts and grows and hardens. No, I say. That’s not how anxiety works. I feel more anxious now, because what if? What if those things happened? “What if” is the tripwire of an anxious mind. The future is the playground of an anxious mind. Imagining the endless possibilities of what can and might happen are the hazardous snares of an anxious mind. Stop making it worse, I want to say, but of course I don’t.
He tries another tactic. Try spinning things in a positive light, he says, try nipping my negative thoughts in the bud, try practicing positivity, but, no, this is also futile for an anxious mind. Every try and subsequent fail simply makes me feel like more of a failure, because I can’t do it on my own, and God why can’t I? Why can’t I just be happy? Why can’t I let it go? Why do these worries and fears circle round and round in an unstoppable dance of fury and fate?
I have a good life. I have a husband who loves me, kids who mean the world to me, a career I would never, ever trade for another.
Why can’t I just be happy?
What is it, then? my husband says. What specifically is it?
This is the question I can’t answer, so I start crying instead. I can’t talk about this right now, I say, because we’ve pulled into the parking lot and it’s time to unload the kids and go plug in our instruments and do a sound check and then sing like the words and melodies wipe away all our troubles.
And because it’s everything.
It’s everything, all piled and tangled and curled into those weights with barbs and spikes that puncture me every time something else goes wrong or could go wrong or might possibly go wrong in the next twenty or fifty years.
And sure, I can tick off those gratitude lists and I can try to take every thought captive and I can post those one hundred happy days pictures, but what happens when none of it works, when seemingly simple practices can’t and don’t save a mind or a heart?
Sometimes we have walked so far down the dark and winding road of not-fine, not-okay, not in a good place, that we need help crawling back to equilibrium.
///
I grew up in two Southern Baptist churches. They were full of grace and hope and people who knew how to love a fatherless kid, or three of them. Southern Baptist, though, is a religion full of rules.
I’d set rules all my life for myself, a personality quirk that served me mostly well, and here, in the middle of religion, were more rules that held a greater purpose, and, yes, of course, please sign me up, because keeping all these rules would finally, finally, finally make me perfect in one domain, even though my eyes were bad and I’d busted up my knee in high school volleyball and I’d broken a pinkie finger in softball that never healed straight.
I could be spiritually perfect. That would have to do.
I constructed my perfect little life, keeping all those potential friends in my youth group at arms’ length, because if they came too close they would see all the hidden holes in my perfection, and I could not let them see. And then I graduated at the top of my class and rode a full scholarship to university, where, even though all those religion rules had begun weighing me down years ago, I signed up to continue in the Southern Baptist tradition on my own, away from the influence of my mom.
I led worship at the Baptist Student Ministry and attended the Baptist church they told me to attend so I could be a leader, and I sat under all those male preachers who said God was always enough and we had a Healer for all our sickness and that when we know Love we will not know fear.
And I tried to make it true for me.
No one ever told me in those churches that there might be a chance my Healer wouldn’t heal the kind of sickness that stuck in the back of a throat and the corner of a mind and froze around the edges of a heart. They only told me to have faith enough to move mountains.
The problem was: this mountain wouldn’t move.
///
We are back home and the kids are in bed, and once again I’m sitting here staring at a pill they said I shouldn’t need if I believed enough; staring at a piece of science they said proves my faith needs drastic, fundamental improvement; staring at a tiny little thing they said tells a definitive story of my spirituality.
I have learned much in the years that roll between then and now. I have learned that there is a fear that can be known in Love, and it is called anxiety. I have learned that there is a place where joy doesn’t come in the morning, and it is called depression. I have learned that taking every thought captive or praying unceasingly or believing that a mountain can move sometimes isn’t enough.
I have learned that we don’t get to choose our disorders, and no amount of faith or joy lists or gratitude tries can change the hold our disorders keep on us. I have learned that seeking help of any kind for the disorders that rob our lives of joy and hope and peace does not mean our faith or our God or our own hearts and minds have failed us. I have learned that we will not overcome by hiding in a dark room and pretending depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, suicide, do not exist for the religiously pious.
I have learned that courage doesn’t always look like jumping out of a war-plane into enemy territory or rushing into a burning house or opening a heart to fix a vessel block. Sometimes it looks like staring at the precipice of ending things and then facing one more day and then another and then another after that, because this is jumping from a war-plane into enemy territory. Sometimes it looks like braving the truth of our disorder and all the opinions and condemnation and misunderstandings that come with it, because this is rushing into a burning house and living to tell about it. Sometimes it looks like popping a pill and letting it work its magic in our mind, because this is our open-heart surgery.
I have learned that there is no shame in inviting medication into our journey toward healing. The world can make us feel like there is, but the world is not telling the truth. There is no shame here. There is only courage. The Healer sends healing, and sometimes it looks like a miraculous mind makeover, but sometimes it looks like a no-less-miraculous tiny white oval.
So I swallow the pill, and I close my eyes, and I thank God for the help finding my way back to an even road, maybe for the first time in my life.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Riley Briggs on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
A couple of weeks ago, a kindergarten teacher at my boys’ elementary school died tragically in a fire during the early morning hours before school. We received a note from the principal in the late afternoon hours letting us know what had happened and how it would be addressed the next day at school.
This was a first for all of us in our school community. Nothing like this has ever happened in this safe bubble in which we live. We have, up until now, been spared these hard conversations.
The morning after receiving this news, I walked my boys to school the same as I always do. We had told them about the tragedy the night before, leaving out the details that had come out in the morning papers and choosing only to tell them that a teacher they knew had died in a fire. My first grader stuck by me the whole walk to school, instead of running ahead like he usually does, and when we were almost at the schoolyard, he said, “Did she really die?”
“Yes, she did,” I said. I tried to grasp for something else to say, but there are moments that simply have no words.
“In a fire?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“How did she die in a fire?” he said. I could tell that he wanted a bit of reassurance that it would never happen to him, but this was something I couldn’t give him.
“Sometimes fires start and people don’t know it until it’s too late,” I said.
“So she died before the fire got her?” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. “We don’t really know.”
That was the end of his questioning at the time, but I knew he would have more for whomever would be talking to his classroom.
This boy’s classroom shares a hallway with all the kindergarten classrooms, and every morning I walk him down the length of it to his door. This morning the everything about that walk felt different—the air, the smell, the silence. The heaviness waiting for us was almost suffocating. Every single 5- and 6-year-old waiting in the hallways for school to start were quiet for the first time in history, probably. Teachers were trying to hold it together. Parents were hovering by their children. I could not look anywhere without tears burning the back of my nose.
None of my three boys who are in school had this particular teacher. I only passed her in the hallways. I didn’t really feel like I was entitled to feel as sad as I did. But I’m the kind of person who can feel the heaviness and the overwhelming sorrow and see it on the faces of others and feel it as if it’s my own. I turned away many times during that walk, because I did not want people to see me cry even though I had not known this teacher personally.
But on the walk home that day, I started thinking about sadness. We live in a world where the proper thing to do is hide our sadness. That’s why there are so many people struggling with depression, which is just anger and sadness turned inward. We don’t talk about these hard places in life, even though they’re everywhere.
The truth is, this isn’t the first hard place my boys have come up against. Maybe it’s the first tragic death they’ve had to sort through when they’re actually old enough to understand death. But they lost a sister five years ago. They know what this feels like. I know what this feels like. It feels like hurry up and get over it and then we’ll talk.
We are taught to believe that strength and perseverance and hope do not include brokenness. But that’s simply not true. Our brokenness, our sadness—they are the precursors to becoming strong and mighty. We step into our cracks and we kneel down and we pour our attention on them, and that is what becomes the superglue that puts us back together.
We do this alone and we do it together.
[Tweet “Our brokenness & sadness are not weaknesses. They are how we become strong & mighty.”]
When we turn away and hide our sadness or our mess or the hard places in our lives, apologizing that we can’t get it together, what we’re doing is denying others the opportunity to step into our cracks with us. To come alongside us and say, Hey, you’re not alone. To take our broken pieces and and glue them back into place.
The opposite of turning away is turning toward. I know that sounds obvious. But what exactly is turning toward in a situation like this one?
It’s acknowledging our sadness, however deep it goes. It’s talking about our sorrow, however founded or unfounded it may be. It’s sharing our pain, our sickness, our burdens with one another and healing together—whether that together is with friends, family or people you just met who share your own pain or sickness or the kind of burdens you carry.
Maybe some won’t always take our brokenness the right way. Maybe sometimes they’ll call us names or shame us or make us feel like we’ve done the exact thing we should never have done. But the only way to survive the hard places is to open them to the light. The only way back to strength is to acknowledge how this thing has weakened us. The only way out is through the cracks.
[Tweet “The only way to survive life’s hard places: let them shatter us & then open them to the light.”]
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and my perspective on clutter. Every Friday, I publish a short personal essay that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Every night around our dinner table, Husband and I ask a few questions of our boys, but the most important one, in our opinion, is this one: What are you thankful for today?
We do this because we want to teach our children the practice of gratitude.
Gratitude is a way of turning every bad situation into a good one. If you know me personally, you might know—although I tend to hide it well—that I’m kind of a glass-half-full kind of person. If it comes down to hope or not hope, I’ll always choose hope, but my anxiety sometimes makes it difficult to embrace every situation in my life with gratitude. That’s why the practice of gratitude has become so important to me.
We get into funks, and I know I’m not alone in this. We can go days, maybe even weeks or months, and all we can see is the negative—this isn’t going to pan out, why am I even trying that, the kids are never going to give me a break.
Sometimes, as Husband likes to tell me, this kind of thinking can create reality. That’s because it’s all a matter of focus. If we’re focused on the negative, negative is all we’ll see. If we’re focused on the positive, positive is mostly what we’ll see.
[Tweet “If we focus on the negative, it’s what we’ll see. If we focus on the positive, it’s what we’ll see.”]
So gratitude is important for our family, because I have a couple of sons who share my amazing ability to lean toward the negative when an undesirable situation presents itself. Practicing gratitude around our dinner table helps us take a disappointing day and stamp it as wonderful, great, spectacular. Or maybe just a little bit better.
When gratitude becomes a danger is when you have a kid who’s had a really great day. His gratitude list might go on forever and ever.
This has happened to us before. Our second son is a glass-mostly-full kind of guy, and he will find thanks in everything. Which is wonderful. And also the slightest bit dangerous, considering we might be tethered to the dinner table for a good part of the evening (and we have many other things to do!).
One night around dinner, he listed as his gratitudes: Mama doing the dishes, his brothers cleaning up his shoes, his teacher for assigning homework he could do in five minutes, his daddy for cooking a yummy dinner, his socks for keeping his feet warm, the dirt out back for making a really nice pile, his baby brother for tossing him a ball, the trampoline for helping him perfect his double air flip, and on and on it went. By the time he was finished, no one had anything else to say. He’s listened every thankful possible, and we just agreed.
It’s also delightful when you have a kid like this—because doing the dishes? That’s definitely not my favorite thing to do. But he will regularly thank me for washing his plate so that he can have breakfast tomorrow. This does wonders for a parents self esteem and persistence.
It’s not easy to name our gratitude for every moment. Some moments are really, really hard. But as we practice, as we make this a consistent lens for the way we see the world, we’ll find that it becomes easier and easier even in the moments that seem like they can’t be redeemed for anything good.
Gratitude—not just for things but for people—has the power to change the world. Who can we thank today? What can we list as our thankful, which will pivot our focus? How might we improve our homes, our relationships, our communities with the practice of gratitude?
[Tweet “Gratitude has the power to change the world. Let’s practice it until the world explodes with light.”]
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and how gratitude might change the world. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Husband and I recently returned from a creative conference, where we got to interact and have conversations about all sorts of things with people we’ve never talked to anywhere but online. I found new friends, with whom I talked about miscarriages, plans for the future, faith, parenting, writing, society’s prejudice against women and many more deep topics.
If you know me at all, you know that I’m not exactly comfortable with shallow conversation. I like to go straight for the heart, and it doesn’t take me long to get there. I have one of those faces, I guess. And I LOVE hearing people’s stories. I love the connections I made with people in this community. I came home feeling exhausted but, at the same time, refreshed.
And this got me thinking about the value of community.
There is the community of my children. I live with seven males, including six of them 9 years old and younger. We have a lot of diversity just under the roof of our house. When I forget how different we all are, my boys step up to the plate to show me, and it’s not always easy. We fight, we resolve, we laugh, we cry, we dislike, we forgive, but most of all we grow. Because what community does is it shows us our sameness but it also shows us our differences.
We are all different. We come from different pasts, from different viewpoints, from different world views. Even the little people within my home have different ways of seeing their worlds. And what would I miss of the world if I didn’t listen to their thoughts or see from their perspective?
What do we miss of truth and thought and love and hope and adventure and philosophy and surprise if we are not engaged in community?
There is value in our differences. There is value in our sameness. But we will never know know that value until we find community.
[Tweet “There is value in our differences and in our sameness. Community shows us our value.”]
We live in a fast-paced society. I know as well as anyone how time can get away from us. It’s not always easy for me to connect with you, because one of my twins will likely be running away in one direction while the other is running away in a completely opposite direction. And our lives can feel like that, too, like two separate trains headed in opposite directions. Community is challenging to create and maintain, because our lives are so busy. How do we find community and connection in a world like this one?
Well, a couple of weeks ago, my boys went trick-or-treating. We’re not big Halloween people, but our neighborhood is safe, and it’s been a loved/hated tradition for the last several years. Husband and I had just returned from the conference I referenced earlier where I had talked to many different people, and I had not yet recovered from my deep conversations. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay out long without crumbling.
I dragged my heels a little. I didn’t really want to go.
We only visited two streets, but at every corner, I saw someone I passed every day on the walk to my boys’ school. We know each other only in passing. But this night, we lingered at their houses for a few minutes and talked to them a little more. I learned one was a chiropractor, that another had the hardest class she’s had to teach in a while, that another hates the Texas Halloween weather, because she’s from Colorado and it was usually snowing by the time Halloween came around.
I learned that community can be forged in a night of trick-or-treating, if we remain open to it.
And that means that community can be forged wherever we remain open.
We become stronger in community. We are better together than we could be alone. So take a few minutes today and get to know someone. It’s likely they’ve been longing for the connection, too.
[Tweet “We are better together than we could be alone. This is the value of community.”]
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and my perspective on community. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
