How do you come back to daily living? How do you re-enter your life?
I had the most amazing and beautiful trip to Nunavut. I spent a lot of time alone on the ocean and came back into myself.
Now – re-entering my day to day life – I seem to have lost the sparkle. The city seems grey and dull compared to the expansive North. I’m not sure how I can weave my experience of the arctic into my getting up, drinking coffee, taking the subway, working at a computer.
It’s like I fell in love with the ocean but now it’s gone and nothing seems to be able to replace it.
I tell myself I should be grateful to be home, for my warm and beautiful house, friends that I love, for interesting work but I feel grey like the city. Maybe it’s because the person I had a crush on just started dating someone. Maybe it’s because nothing can be as wild and beautiful as the arctic.
I’m chai tea and listening to Sufjan Stevens. I’m wearing a summer dress. I’m trying to try to kickstart my spirit that was smothered by the rain.
How do we navigate the space after these wild and beautiful experiences? How do we re-enter our daily lives after we’ve had our hearts cracked open? How do we stay inside? How do we stay with our work? How can I bring that expansive feeling of the arctic into my living room?
At one of the group therapy workshops that I took, they reminded us that after an expansion there is a natural contraction that happens. We have moments that open our hearts wider than we thought was possible but our hearts cannot stay open like that forever. A quiet closing inwards again is natural.
And the other thing I’ve learned is that every expansive experience ends in a different way. Sometimes it ends in sobbing, sometimes, like this time, it is a quiet dulling, sometimes it is possible to bring the expansiveness into my life and work and everything lights up.
My heart opened to a land and it’s people and now it must break a little bit.
And one reaction I could have is to harden my heart, never open it again because that’s the only way to ensure it will never break again. But I can’t do that.
Every time we open ourselves to love, heartbreak becomes inevitable. So we can live a life full of the love and heart break or we can as Kahlil Gibran writes in the Prophet move into,
The seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Do you want to:
- Feel calmer?
- Stop feeling so drained?
- Have more time for what you love?
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Take care of yourself!!
Bryn
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Bryn Bamber
Career Burnout Coach
The Courage Compass
bryn@couragecompass.org
