breathe

Lately I feel like I'm living in some gray space, between times. I know that the past months have happened, and I know what has happened in those months, and I know that eventually I will have a job again and step back into the flow of life. I'll feel more healed than now as far as all my maladies go, and perhaps at some point my youngest sister and I will be on speaking terms once more. 

But right now, I'm just hanging out in limbo. 

Perhaps it could be better described as that hole through which Alice falls from reality to Wonderland: paused in eternal free fall. Or more mundanely: standing in the hallway, unsure of which door you needed to access - closet for jacket, door for linens? 

Either way, the things that I feel as permanent will eventually alter. I'm just horrible at waiting for that change. 

I've been doing all the things I'm supposed to: networking, looking for a job, researching companies. I've got multiple versions of my resume, and about fifty cover letters, all tailored to individual companies. All my media is updated, and my phone doesn't leave a three-foot vicinity of my hands until bedtime. I'm eating and sleeping and healing, and using CBT to deal with bouts of depression and inadequacy that roll through. I'm reminding myself that I can only control my own emotions, and not those of others. 

All that, and yet I'm still in the gray, thrashing and kicking and wanting to move into either darkness or light or maybe just a firmer footing.  

*

Lesson number one, which the universe pushed on me over the past year, was how to recognize when help is needed and then how to ask for and accept said assistance. 

The second lesson was a reminder: how to be patient. 

I'm not always great at being patient. I'm one of those people who reads the ends of books, because I'm too impatient to wait for the end if I know what is probably coming. I also read ahead online when we're watching TV shows, and I'm an inveterate traffic-checker, just to avoid accidents or slow downs whilst driving. If a bag of chocolate enters our house, it's odds that before the end of the day, the entire bag will be gone. 

You might classify all this as lack of willpower, but really, it's impatience. 

Being in this gray space is enforced learning. I can't hurry snow, or healing, or laundry; I cannot rush my job search, or shove my sibling into being willing to heal our relationship. I can only breathe into my impatience. 

*

In September we visited Dan's side of the family. Whenever we do so, we stay in a hotel with a pool, and go swimming with our nieces. 

So we're in the pool, me and the three girls. They're racing and playing games undecipherable to an adult, even to one who still lives primarily inside her own imagination (that's me, fyi...). They started out years ago as fearful swimmers, but are now quite comfortable swimming on their own, without an adult dogging their every liquid move. I'm extraneous, another body clogging their creative arena. 

I moved to the deeper end of the pool, and was simply thinking when our eight year old niece swam by. "Auntie, what are you doing?" she burbled, limbs flashing beneath the water. 

"Treading water," I replied. "It's the first thing I was taught to do in water." 

Probably not the first thing; that was no doubt blowing bubbles or something equally youthful. But my first memory of swimming lessons is comprised of chlorine, bright early summer light, and moving my arms and legs to keep my head above water, a voice telling me to relax and breathe. Once I got the hang of it, I felt like I could tread water forever. 

I think about that now, watching watery November sun cast morning shadows across our snow-patched lawn. Maybe I'm not so much falling through this gray space, so much as I'm keeping my head above water, relaxing into the feeling of staying afloat. 

It might not be something I want to do forever, but I know I can, if I just breathe.