Several years ago I watched a Ted Talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on extreme success and extreme failure. She made the point that both positions catapult you out of your normal range of emotion and so both are hard to process. Both feel surreal because they aren’t everyday occurrences. Her point is resonating with me because I just got back from my sister’s wedding.
Not only did I see extended family for the first time since 2015 or 2016, but I also saw my sister’s friends from middle and high school. These are people I know too, although obviously not as well. They aren’t my friends but they are people who were tangentially in my life. We reconnected for a brief moment in time, a few hours, and that was it. Not only did I see them, but friends Rosie and I have in common, and, of course, immediate family, who don’t live close to me. It’s hard, really hard, to connect with people who mean something to me and then separate again.
As much as I would like to maintain relationships with all the people I love and care about, it’s not possible. Having a weekend where that happens to a degree is difficult because I get a small taste of what I want, but just that small taste.
Maybe other people have already made peace with this and don’t really care, but that’s not me. My Sanskrit name, Radha, means the personification of love so in my ideal world, I’d be close with every person I hold in my heart. I’d see all of them regularly. We’d be up to date on each other’s lives. We’d have adventures together. We’d travel together. We’d be integrally connected. But that doesn’t happen.
Maybe instead of trying to force the impossible, I can embrace the ephemeral. This is why people talk about living in the moment, right? Because this moment and the next and the next aren’t repeatable? As much as we try to recreate experiences, we can’t, can we? That means sometimes life will take you far and wide. You’ll experience moments that are so surreal they’re hard to comprehend. It may be extreme success, dismal failure, or the convergence of multiple people from various points in your life. Whatever it is, I’ll bet you’ll have surreal experiences too.
I don’t have a lesson here. I don’t have any advice. The best I can do is recognize sometimes I won’t be able to integrate certain experiences because they’re so outside the range of normal that I can’t. And that’s OK. That, too, is what it means to be alive. Embracing the surreal is just a part of life.
I dream of a world where we recognize we will have moments that aren’t in our normal range. A world where we understand some things will feel surreal. A world where we embrace that, accept that reality and make peace with it.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
“First things sucks and then they’re awesome,” could be the theme for me this week. I was in Chicago for my annual work conference and things just did. not. start. well. I checked into my hotel – kind of a dump compared to where they put us up last year – and looked around the room for the mini-refrigerator I requested. (Eating my sattvic diet, which means no meat, no eggs, no onions, no garlic, no mushrooms can be quite challenging while traveling. The easiest way to cope is to go grocery shopping.) The fridge wasn’t there.
I picked up the room phone and dialed the front desk.
“Hi, I requested a mini-refrigerator weeks ago and it’s not here.”
“I’m sorry, we only have one refrigerator in the entire hotel and it’s for medicine,” the front desk clerk told me.
“But I requested it weeks ago,” I explained while trying (unsuccessfully) to keep the frustration out of my voice.
“I’m sorry, so did our other guest. Do you need it for medical reasons?”
“Yes.” (Diet is a medical reason, right? Plus I still have a sprained ankle and needed somewhere to freeze my icepack.)
“Can you keep it here at the front desk?” she asked.
“No, I need to take it at regular intervals.” (Food needs to be taken at regular intervals!)
“Ok, let me get back to you,” she said.
I sat on the bed, already cantankerous because I was completely exhausted from waking up early to catch my flight and from traveling over Thanksgiving. I was so not in the mood to deal with this.
She called me back and said I could stay in the studios next door, which had full refrigerators.
“Is it going to cost extra?”
“No, it’s for medicine, right?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Then no, it’s not.”
I packed up my stuff again and went next door to the hotel’s long-term residences. (I think that’s what they’re called.) I walked in and the place was practically twice the size of my previous room. And it had a full kitchen – stove, microwave, refrigerator. First things sucked then they were awesome.
A couple of days later my icepack snapped in half because the freezer setting was too high, making my icepack extremely brittle. Aiyee. Walking around a conference all day on a sprained ankle without ice is not a good thing. I strapped on my black medical boot and hobbled to the closest Walgreen’s in the freezing cold. When I got there what did I find? They were running a special on combination heat/ice packs. Buy one get one free. First things sucked then they were awesome.
I could write a few more because this whole week things have been like that, but really I want to say this is an extension of my post from two weeks ago: “Hitaesanápresito’pavargah,” meaning ultimately everything is for our own good. I may not believe it at the time, but this week has been a good indicator of how my higher power really does love me and really does want what’s best for me. How everything happens for a reason in my best interest. I may not believe it at the time but really it does.
I needed to be reminded of that this week because I’m undergoing massive challenges in my life right now on seemingly every plane. It’s enough to make a girl sit down and cry (and I have). Sometimes I don’t believe everything will turn out the better. Sometimes I believe things just suck. Period. But they don’t. It may just take a while for the awesome to show up. It may take years before I understand why I had to go through what I did. But every time I look back I see clearly I came out the better. I see the hardship, the pain, the suck, if you will, ultimately led me to something bigger, broader, grander, and more awesome. And when I remember that I feel much better.
I dream of a world where we can hang in long enough to see the rainbow at the end of the storm. I dream of a world where we realize everything is ultimately for our own good. A world where we understand sometimes at first things suck but then they are awesome. A world where we understand sometimes the weeds have to be cleared to allow for new growth. A world where we can keep in mind divine right action is always taking place in our lives whether we know it or not.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.