fear + courage
I've come back to this post three times since I started writing it and every time I come back, I have something new that I want to tell you about that feels more urgent than the thing I'd started before. Bloggers and content creators would tell me write that all down because there will be days when I don't feel like writing and it'll be nice to have ideas then. But I'll tell you what: if I don't feel like writing, my writing is going to be crap. And since writing isn't my job, I won't put any of us through that.
I talked to one of my sisters for a while last night. In fairness, I talk to my sisters pretty regularly. I have 5 of them and we each manage to stay in touch one-on-one from across a country in our own ways. Some I message with daily, others weekly, and my eldest sister (who is also my godmother) and I exchange written letters. Which take their time to be written and sent, and they ebb and flow over the years depending on our lives. But it's one of my favorite things. I've kept all of her letters for decades. I have been looking forward to a quiet moment to sit down and reply to the one I got the other day.
Anyway, I was talking to my sister last night about fear and risk and courage. About recognizing certain patterns of unhappiness (sorry for all of you wonderful friends of mine who have walked that road with me for a while) and trying to figure out which ones are circumstantial and which are personal pathology. Which can be controlled by environmental shifts and which have to be unpacked a little more carefully. About the responsibility ultimately being ours to create a circumstance for ourselves in which we can thrive and best contribute to the world in a way that we value. I make big decisions quickly and I fear misperception. But I rarely regret the decisions I've made. Which means I spend a lot of wasted time worrying about what other people think of me, and too little time just trusting my intelligence, my observations, and my experience as I make said decisions. She makes big decisions more slowly, with a different relationship to certain securities, and with different priorities identified, and the process always appears so smart to me. So here we are. Both of us standing on the precipice of big decisions knowing which direction we will probably go, but each wishing we had a little more of the other in us. Or at least the perception of the other. Because fear is the same and courage is the same. And it's never just one. It's always both at the same time.
Oh, flowers? Right. Flowers. Here are some from the last couple of weeks of orders and events. Thanks for reading all of this, friends.
