Most people I know are constantly adapting to very busy lives. It’s work. It’s health. It’s fullness. Yes, full live remains the best description I can offer.
Thursday, my colleagues in planning and designing a conference on creating healthier healthcare systems, spoke to some of this. Steve Ryman from Oregon. Kathy Jourdain from Nova Scotia.
I offered this image of toddlers learning to walk, and later wrote some in email about it. That is below. Steve and Kathy added to the images. Steve talking about his earlier hiking experiences, hopping and bouncing from one boulder to another to come down a mountain. “If you try to think it too much, it is painfully slow and difficult. Too much caution is actually more difficult. If you get in the flow of it, it is faster and easier!” I know this feeling. From skiing also. Moguls are meant to be skied. Faster. Easier. More exhilarating too, though I’ve cautiously slid down many in my time.
All of it is about learning and practicing to be in flow, a seemingly essential capacity for these times.
With gratitude for my boy, toddlers, hiking, and skiing.
“I would like to offer an image that has been very present for me these last weeks. It is for me about relationship to time, the busyness of life, the quickness of pace, the availability of consciousness.
My six year old Elijah is a big kid. He is in first grade. He weighs 92+ pounds. When he runs, he has a bit of clumsyness in him. A bit like he is falling forward. Looks like he is going to fall, but is learning to get those legs underneath his big frame in motion. This reminds me of younger children, toddlers first learning to walk. As a parent, I found this joyful and also hard to watch. I felt, “I know they need to do this, but they are going to fall a bunch and I sometimes need to turn my eyes away.” However, it all happens. In most cases, learning to walk and run happens from the experience of falling forward with grace.
In these times, this image helps me. I feel myself tumbling forward in the saying of yes. Falling forward in the availability of shifting consciousness, and how it changes the game. Learning to find my legs.
With hope, gratitude, and anticipation for all to unfold in helpful and well ways.”