Sometimes (or ... a lot of the time?) (almost always?), peace of mind is super hard to find! Yet I know that banging my head against the wall doesn’t bring me any closer to finding it.
Dear Fellow Fretters,
I worry about people. I worry about money. I worry about death. And, I worry about life. AND, I even worry about worrying!
Worrying about what we can’t control is pretty useless, right? So ... why do we worry?
I treasure living so much that sometimes, I feel the urge to box it up like an actual heirloom I’m afraid of damaging or losing. But the moment that I try to box up my joy for safekeeping, the joy no longer feels quite like joy. It feels more like rigidity, more like fear.
I entered this week expecting to feel peaceful. I had taken time to decompress over the weekend. And, it was time to drop off my artwork at the Van der Plas gallery this week! AND, I was excited about the topic for my vocal jazz class: songwriting! I felt all these warm, fuzzy sparks crackling from within.
And then ... the past week wasn’t what I expected. I felt hurt and frustrated. A lot. My PTSD therapy sessions were hard. I wanted to escape and still, I chose to stay. And I had awful flashbacks several days in a row.
But one of the reasons why I felt frustration over the course of the week was I had this idea in my head that “this was supposed to be my happy, relaxed week! I worked so hard to make it that way!” In other words, how will I ever feel relaxed if I feel this sucky way right now, even after working so hard to make this week more peaceful?
The truth is I was right to get my hopes up because disappointment is far better, I think, than refusing to acknowledge my own wants and needs. And I’m also right to realize that you can’t force happiness or peace. There’s an easygoingness about joy. Peace of mind doesn’t come from telling myself that I should be happy or I should be relaxed.
Sometimes (or ... a lot of the time?) (almost always?), peace of mind is super hard to find! Yet I know that banging my head against the wall doesn’t bring me any closer to finding it.
I keep learning how to let some days be whatever they are. There’s so much I care about and so much I want to do. There's so much about life that I want to soak up and appreciate. Yet when “doing” feels barely doable and when I feel more devastated than exhilarated, I want to be okay with that.
And when I inevitably again get stuck on the idea that life is so precious that I must live EVERY moment to its fullest, I’ll try to remember that trying to box up, store away, or force joy doesn’t work. When I feel that hope is lost, all I really have to do is wait until I can find it again.
Yours even when the chicken doodle soup gets cold,
Nicole Sylvia Javorsky
P.S. Joy returned soon after I wrote this edition. And maybe that's because in writing the above, I had made some peace with its absence. Or, maybe I had just allowed myself to feel my emotions and let them pass through me.
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