Pace

I've been feeling put out by our kids dance recitals.  2 recitals on separate weekends with separate dress rehearsals and so on. One at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga and one at a school in Oakville.  Totally annoyed by the 14 emails that have so many details and times and co-ordinations to execute to get them where they need to be in the right clothes with the right hair etc. etc.  I have lamented how I don't have the desire to make it happen for them because I'm so damn flat and tired.  I've wished it gone on several occasions and thought "woe is me!" why did I sign us up for this?

 And then today, my amazing daughter got up on that stage and blew me away with how much this mattered to her.  I burst into sobs as she danced trying to hide it from everyone around me.  Tears streamed down my face as I realized that we signed them up for these classes when we had the energy and strength to handle the recitals and details.  It was back in October before my first surgery and when we were focused on what was best for them.  And so as I watched all the other acts (some of which were so spectacular I burst into tears again) I realized that it's not our life that is wrong it's the pace.  

Imagine life as a spinning top that you grasp the very tip of when you are born and hang on as it starts spinning and spinning, increasing in speed as you go along adding people, tasks and goals as you go.  You get to set the pace of the spinning to match the strength that you have to hang on over time and in our case I/we have always maxed out the rate of spinning to be almost identical to our strength and up until now that's worked out swimmingly.  

We expedited marriage, children, home purchasing and career goals (faster, faster!) and maintained an even steady grasp on top of the spinning top.  What we underestimated was when your strength to hang on is compromised the whole thing starts to wobble and tip and the whole thing gets quite precarious and scary.

If life were actually a spinning top when your lack of strength caused you to let go you would get to start all over trying to get on to the top of the top, slowly starting the spinning (adding the people, tasks and things again) and seeing how strong you are now and how fast you can go.  

In reality, the whole thing wobbles and wibbles and life things are flung off in all directions and you have to hang on because if the thing falls over in this analogy that means you're dead (it's my analogy so I get to set the parameters here, stay with me).  

In essence, the pace we have set is too fast for our current strength and we have had to let go of some of the people and things that we were quite capable of managing before.  Our grip has loosened and unless we are very careful the things that really matter: each other, our kids, our careers (which pay for the aforementioned life and kids) will be flung off and be damaged and so we have had to reevaluate our priorities and time spend.  

While this doesn't sound like a bad thing as I write it here, we all need a good hard look at where we are at from time to time.  It is a little daunting to think that the life we have built is currently to much for us to handle.  We simply aren't strong enough to keep it all spinning right now and we aren't sure where we will land over time as far as taking back on all the things we had set up for ourselves before.  

Some people have flung themselves off by choice because they either don't understand or can't find the time or empathy to stick it out with us and so bu-bye, we've made a note and you won't be let back in even when we have the energy again.  It's been a hard and disappointing and isolating time but we are moving through it.  

Some of the things we love to do, like go out with our friends once a week have had to be put on hold too because there simply isn't the energy for it and so that feels weird and makes us a bit odd since we are out of touch with much of what is happening in our social circles.  

We have completely cancelled spending time or energy on anyone that is filled with hate or negativity or requires coaching on how to talk about sex, women, race, LGBTQ issues and so on because we just can't justify spending any of our limited free time arguing or feeling the need to protect our kids, like not one second.  

Our pace is changing, constantly being revised to suit our strength level and we are finding the energy for the things we love, which in essence are each other and our babies, our closest family that have stuck through it with us and our amazing friends.  I wrote about the other side and we are getting there, it just looks a little different than we imagined.

37 roses wasn't even enough - 1000 wouldn't have been close,  This girl is pure magic.