At the very beginning of an excellent children’s book – A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle – there’s a scene where Meg can’t sleep for worrying, so she goes downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of hot cocoa.
She found her little brother, and a saucepan of milk on the stove, and they were mostly exclusive about it.
Sometimes, when I’m alone in my own attic bedroom and I can’t sleep for worrying, I get up and go downstairs and make hot cocoa, and sometimes it helps.
This evening, I also made a largish batch of macaroni & cheese for the weekend, and cleaned up the kitchen, and listened to my parents’ Christmas CDs, and played with a dog who also kind of needed that.
Solace comes from the weirdest places. Sometimes the most effective act of self-soothing and a bad habit can be exactly the same thing. Sometimes the thing that you know you need to do to take care of yourself is the one thing that you know is going to hurt the most. Letting go, speaking out, turning around and going back, saying the words you’ve been keeping inside. Those moments can fucking sting like anything, and they’re also frequently the moments when the multiverse shifts and everything changes for good.
“It’s in every one of us to be wise. Find your heart, open up both your eyes.
We can all know everything without ever knowing why.
It’s in every one of us, by and by…”
~ John Denver
Never stop changing, continue to grow, do the uncomfortable things over and over again until you are comfortable being uncomfortable. You are constantly becoming.
And – somehow, at the same time -remember that it is also okay to rest, to set down the burdens for just a little while. They’ll be there later, when you come back, if you choose to. Take a moment to just be where you are, and appreciate the little things. It’s all we’ve got, you see. And at the same time, it’s everything.
✨
When I was very little, I used to fall asleep in the back of the car on long car rides at night, and I can remember my dad scooping me up and carrying me up the front steps and into the house. Specifically, I remember his whiskers, I remember his footsteps, the gravel of under his shoes and the creaking of the hinges of the front door.
We used to look up at the stars, and feel so small.
It’s an unexpectedly comforting perspective.
“It is clear that we are just an advanced breed of primates, on a minor planet, orbiting an average star, in the outer suburbs of one among a hundred billion galaxies. But, ever since the dawn of civilization, people have craved for an understanding of an underlying order of the world. There ought to be something very special about the outer conditions of the universe. And what can be more special than that there is no boundary. There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there’s life, there is hope.”
~ Stephen Hawking, in the movie The Theory of Everything, muchhh paraphrased