THANKFUL FRIDAY

Today, I’d like to celebrate the relativity of time. I know there is a lot of love/hate feelings regarding Daylight Savings Time and the idea of ‘loosing an hour’. My alarm is set for 5:25 AM (yes, it’s a specifically weird time to get up, I have my reasons), but for the last month I have been waking up at 4:25. This totally screws up any notion of getting up at 5:25. So, I thought that the time change was going to work in my favor.

It did not. Still waking up at 4:25, except now with serious low back pain.

Yay!

Thanks to this whole pain situation, I am constantly moving my body and have had the most consistent yoga practice that I have had in months. Stillness invites pain.

While everyone was celebrating Pi Day, somewhere in the Metaverse, Chris and I were off celebrating our twenty fifth wedding anniversary. It has been twenty five years since we graduated undergrad. I have had my Yoga Teacher Training certificate for fourteen years. I have lived in Kansas City for twelve years, one of those years was with Chris. A year and a half of that time was spent alone. Michael and I have been together for ten years this June. The Cabbage turns thirteen in September. All of this feels like yesterday. All of this feels like now. All of this feels like the future.

All of this is relative.

Rather than finding ourselves in everything, we are challenged daily to find everything in ourselves, till being human is evolving inwardly in the likeness of everything, shaping ourselves to the wonders we find, unlike birds, who have known this forever, we too make song at the mere appearance of light. - Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Recently there was a video put together at work to celebrate International Women’s Day. I did not participate, but I watched and listened as a number of my colleagues listed all of the different hats they wear besides the scientist hat. I thought about my own hat collection and how we are all more than just one thing, how often we are challenged to be more than just one thing. I love all of my hats or at least most of them. There are some hats I would not own if time was different. There are hats in my collection because time is different. I do have one constant in all of this relativity. An hour ahead. An hour behind. Years ago and years ahead. In the right now. I have always greeted the day in search of light. It is not naivety, but self preservation.

This is the thing that guides me as I navigate the strange and wild passage of time.