five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes...

stepping back from social media so as not to miss the season of flannel, rom-coms and generosity.

“what you consume, consumes you.” ~brianna wiest

i love, love, looooove october…the days when fall will surely settle in.

my playlist of “autumn leaves” by all of the best will be on repeat. nat king cole, chet, edith, diane, frank, miles, harry…

the mix of candy corn and dry roasted peanuts will appear as a prerequisite to the puppy chow of december.

there’s a tree in a park in the city that will have it’s moment of fall perfection and one day soon i will do my best to reach that chunky sweater from the top of my closet and rescue my fuzzy boots from the tote in the loft.

october is this side of the last bit of summer that everyone clings to in september -and the prelude to the holiday fury.

the cool weather traditions begin like the family trip to a local cider mill - something we’ve done with family and friends for years. and years. usually there’s a fall festival and a line for cider slushes and white paper bags full of cider donuts. we hold little people up to watch crisp, fresh apples roll down conveyor belts onto steel ramps into machines that will smush the juice into take home gallons and we take pictures. some years the group is bigger and others smaller and life just ebbs and flows like that.

i feel about this month like i feel about a sunday. it’s set apart…sacred and a bit melancholy with an air of reverence.

it feels like a month of low expectations…quietly appearing and effortlessly becoming bodacious. blessing us with brilliancy of color, bringing the respite of a breeze after the heat and showing mercy before the winter.

those leaves floating to the ground falling away, skipping down the street leaving branches bare feel like some kind of call to action to stop and watch while you can. maybe because the stripping away signals the beauty and bareness of fall. maybe it’s the silent shedding followed by the stark reality that all of that vibrancy floats away and leaves a hush that begets a natural hibernation. the entrance to a season of slow.

this year i had to ease into october and just as i felt like i was catching up — here we are at the end.

stepping away from the fray to mull some things over…

last winter i listened to krista tippett ( as one should ) talk about living from our interior: a deep inner life rich in reflection, contemplation, and quiet, which allows one to be grounded or present.

i think about that often, although of late i’ve fallen out of touch with what really lies there in the inner most parts of me. i think i’ve been buried under layers of fear or shame, envy and longing or believing that i shouldn’t long for more.

learning to live from the interior reminds me that i’ve taken on the tender work of sifting through the different versions of me to find the one. the compilation who survived.

in order to do that - i had to edit the disorder, which for me meant a season of backing away from social media.

i live alone and tend to talk myself out loud. a lot. anyway, one day after entirely too much time on social media and feeling that empty feeling that comes with wasting so much time in a faux world, i realized the absurdity of it all.

all at once, holding a rectangle object in my hand looking into other peoples lives and habits and tragedies under the glare of a blue light for more minutes than i care to admit, felt as senseless as it actually is.

there’s a notting hill kind of montage that happens in my neighborhood every day where i pass people walking dogs with a leash in one hand and a phone in the other. season after season. i can’t tell you the number of times i’ve had to stop and move to the side lest said dog walker/phone gazer run straight into my person. that’s not a generational observation - it’s an unfortunate fact —and —i was doing the same thing in the coziness of home.

i could feel a slow knowing that i was losing myself to superficial content that someone on the other side had spent hours creating until i heard myself muttering something like exactly how much time are you spending on your phone while life is happening around you and just outside of your oversized windows? i was putting off moving around my day, not paying attention to what could fill a morning by peeking in on someone else’s ordinary.

five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.

those words, that first line of a beloved song, popped in and made itself right at home in my over worked brain, proceeding to settle in as an ear worm to wake me up to that absurdity of handing over hours of my time to tiny squares and algorithms on a phone as if it was the object of my affection.

five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.

how do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife…

~jonathan larson ( seasons of love )

the noise ( especially lately ) from instagram felt palpable and was consuming the tiny semi-healthy pieces of my central nervous system. so much so that i was staring out the window of my loft wondering why i wasn’t looking forward to the changing leaves or that spotify playlist or any pieces of my favorite season.

i felt tangled up in a coping mechanism. it was an escape.

what i didn’t realize was that i was afraid to look around in my isolation to see what could be if i welcomed the possibilities that waited in the solitude.

when envy is your current center, the guilt and uneasiness, sadness and fear of never again having creative control of the life you thought you might curate is only further stirred by peeking in to see who bought what or went where or fed their entire family at the crowded table you long for. reading through squinty eyes about how someone bounced back into abundance after divorce or even interruptions caused by self made decisions, whether the “rebuilding” was smooth or contentious, usually made me wonder at the ease with which others were organizing their life after disruption. it seemed like everything fell into place far beyond what they planned or pinned or prayed for.

the deception of highlight reels is very real and the truth is that the majority of us don’t have lives that just flow merrily along but when it does or doesn’t, sharing can be a wonderful thing — but for me —the number of hours i was giving to watching other peoples lives; the really sweet and the tragic and superficial and those i deeply admire for tireless advocacy and some daily insanity and laughter — was taking away my ability to see that i was giving my moments away.

i’m also desperately aware that deliberately paying attention to the violence of war and to hunger and lives being dismantled, brings everything into perspective and that my bemoaning anything at all is certainly uncalled for. the part of media that keeps me in that reality feels deeply necessary.

i have friends born from connections on social media, text threads and voice notes with ongoing conversations about what we’re cooking or watching or why we’re worried or why does writing have such a pull on us and why is it so ominous? lovely interactions and meaningful talks and screenshots of dm’s that i refer back to when i feel less of me then i would like to.

and…

i was unable to be still and just…be still.

stepping away made room for craving new thoughts. new words. new voices. new something. i wanted to be drawn back into the present and the presence of people, away from wandering about in the old news of so many missing pieces. another year…another season…old expectations.

i wanted to crave a new chapter.

october and a new attentiveness.

my mantra for the past twenty five years or so has been “in quietness and confidence will be your strength.” words straight from isaiah. the God that i know has whispered those words into my ear over and over and over again since the day i knew i was going to became a single mother.

i heard it on a cold december monday morning as i was walked very tentatively on to an elevator that took me up several floors to my first corporate job. i was forty, newly divorced, fragile, intimidated and determined to show my kids that we would make it after all.

there’s a hush like the air in october that swoops over me every time i hear that whisper…like a reminder that i haven’t been forgotten.

a few years ago i heard those same words just before i walked into a meeting that would be the beginning of the end of my career and then, after some falling away of things, the whisper seemed to go silent as if it had slipped to the back of the room full of chaos. there was an interlude of dormancy until recently when i heard the words again, fresh out of hiding and affirmed through reading and waiting and the end of hovering in false realities. i felt like i was given permission to reclaim my time, maybe there was an untangling and i was available again to pay attention now that there was more room in the interior.

october seems to be saying that now is the time for contemplative quietness and silence and space to listen for new things without an agenda. a time to be open to new confidence.

henri nouwen says: in solitude we not only come to peace and quietness but also to a new attentiveness.

this is the month we begin to cover ourselves in flannel and keep our hands wrapped around that favorite mug of coffee a little longer. the hush of dusk seems a little more melancholy and it draws us inward. lights on timers flicker on an hour earlier and blankets and candles appear. it’s a time when we begin to feel rumblings of what we’ve done or haven’t done so far this year and i wish for all of us furious grace when those lists begin to form in our over flowing minds.

in this season a sense of gathering emerges while huddles form and maybe we begin to notice each other’s presence again.

i still peer into instagram a couple of times a week but i don’t feel the need to linger…maybe it’s self preservation as i continue to shimmy my way through an exceptionally long season of envy ( while sitting wide awake in the awareness and deep appreciation for what is mine ) but stepping back continues to allow me to accept an introduction to the seasons of gratitude and generosity and the invitation to a new attentiveness.

i hope we find stillness and settle in and embrace this season living from our interior untangled as we walk in knowing more about who we are and what we long for and how our inner selves are truly waiting to come back around to the present. i hope we become respites and pull each other in and welcome the falling away to make room for the one, the compilation of ourselves who survived to crave a new chapter…like october in the fall.

here’s to reclaiming our moments-

in sunsets, in laughter, in cups of coffee…RuAnn