Phone home

While I was home in New York over Christmas break, I had the rare opportunity to grab brunch with two of my girlfriends whom I've known since elementary school. As the years go by, the number of times the three of us are in the same place at the same time grows smaller. It had been about 18 months since the last time we'd found ourselves seated around the same table.

Of course, we'd "kept in touch" via social media, receiving glimpses into each other's lives through vacation photos and status updates. We knew the picture-perfect, edited-down versions well. Over eggs and toast, however, the hidden realness started to come out. As we shared more, it turned out that all of our lives had been pretty life-like during the time we hadn't seen each other. In our separate corners of the country, we had each experienced our fair share of career questioning, relationship struggles, and general growing up anxieties. One friend joked that, before coming to lunch, she had made a bet with her mom about which of us would end up engaged first, a bet which ended up being comically far from the truth. But for some reason, even when we had been crawling through the same muddy challenges, we hesitated to pick up the phone since we assumed that the others had been doing everything right, floating through the world with ease.

This year, I've heard more and more of my friends vowing to stay off social media, or to only check one app one time per day, resolving to get more in touch with the real world. While I haven't imposed strict limits on myself for 2017, I have made a pledge to text, call, or invite my friends to have actual conversations more frequently. As we get older and our sense of home becomes a bit blurred, our connections to the people we love become that much more important. A couple of cups of coffee, even when shared in silence, can often say a lot more than 140 characters.

Thankful

I'm about to head out to West Texas to visit Marfa and Big Bend for the rest of the week, so of course I'm thankful for that. And to have the week off of work which allowed me to sleep until 10:00 the past two days. Praise be.

But this past month for me has been sad! The world is in a strange place, my roommate and dear friend is en route to move to the East Coast, and the person I love more than anything told me he's leaving, too. No one wants to read blog posts about missing friends or hurting hearts. How whiny! How boring! How trite!

And so I think when people ask, "How are you doing?", they expect the standard, "I'm well. How about you?" Or we feel pressured to say, "I'm doing okay", or, "I feel sad, but things will get better". But sometimes we're just plain old sad. And we know things will get better, but then they'll probably be sad again someday, and get better again, and the cycle will continue on and on forever because that's how life goes.

We learn grasp for the good. Like when Eastside Yoga let me rent out a room to give Lainie a proper send off with her closest Austin friends. Or an unexpected adventure to another National Park. Or the fact that friends and strangers will even ask how you're doing at all.

So I hope you find that it's ok to say when you're sad, and then stop there. And instead of wishing it away so quickly, discover that it can be interesting to sit with a feeling, to find out how you respond to it, and what it has to teach you. That way, probably not today or next week or even by 2017, but whenever you're really ready, you might start to see the goodness glittering around its edges.