A participant in the Monday meeting shared an anecdote about the joy in peering above her and seeing a whimsical art piece in the tree above her, and what a positive impact it had on her.
It reminded me of a story from the early 2000s, when I used to run half-marathons with my lifelong friend Whit. I wasn’t a jock at any point in my youth, so to reach adulthood and gravitate to distance running was a surprise.
Whit is the opposite, and even 20+ years ago was already dedicated to fitness and martial arts. He worked out this morning, in fact. On the other hand, I’m eating dark chocolate espresso beans as I write this.
The drive to the starting line near the convention center was going according to plan until we parked and he discovered that he could not find his admission card. The atmosphere in the car went from fun to frantic. After looking every place we could think of, all we were running was out of time. I suggested that among the thousands of participants in the race, others surely misplaced their cards, so some accommodation must be available. It made sense, but this required a leap of faith. Once we locked up and walked to the convention center, we relinquished our option to continue searching the car.
And sure enough, folks without cards were easily accommodated. We ran the race, hobbled back to the car, and as he prepared to drive off, he lowered the visor in search of his sunglasses.
With perfect comedic timing, the errant card fell in his lap. We’d looked everywhere but up.
We laughed that wordless, gasping laughter that can overcome a person only so often in a lifetime. Seconds stretched into minutes as we struggled to catch our breath and laughed at the perfectly absurd postscript to this chapter in our life as friends.
We parents can fixate on unfinished conversations, triggers, worries about the future, and perhaps an endless list of other estrangement-related distress, from the nuanced to the numerous.
I experienced two partial “I can’t” days this week. Those are what I call depressive episodes. For much of Sunday and part of Monday, I was fixating, looking down at an emotional cauldron that threatened to subsume me. I’d not had such days for perhaps six months or more, and these two were doing a number on my wellbeing.
In counseling sessions last year, I made a point to include more discussion of our brain’s neuroplasticity. When we don’t do the work to counter our negative thoughts, they effectively create neurochemical trenches that are hard to look up and out of.
When I did look up, finally, what did I see? A virtual room full of PLACE peers, all in their respective places on their healing journeys, holding space for each other, including me. Whereas 24 hours prior I’d heard Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” and burst into tears, on Monday it was leaning on others that allowed me to raise my head, literally and figuratively, and begin the process of leaving “I can’t” behind.
I cannot thank you enough. I’m a good counselor, but I’m also a hurting parent, and there simply is no substitute for being able to connect with you all when I need it most.
