I recently picked up an old software project that had been collecting a bit of dust. It was something I worked on with a friend a couple months back, and we had a lot of fun making it. But life things crept in and took focus for both of us, so we got it to a good place where the project could be left in “storage” for a while, its future features’ by-when dates set to the nebulous “TBD”.

And then last week, I decided it was time to give our project the nice coat of paint we always wanted it to have. I checked out our prototype, decided on the feature to fix, and a feature to add. Keep it simple to start. My brain reached for the next step…

…but nothing appeared.

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At the moment, I’m able to decide my schedule each day. Of course, there are a couple important nodes that MUST be attended to at certain times. But what I’ve become present to is something I had only dreamed about years before — distinct pockets of blank open time.

As soon as I started to realize this space existed, thoughts of should-be-doing filled my mind. Every role I hold for myself or others worked to make its obligations heard, arguing for its tasks to be attended to. And why not pick one and do it? And then another, and another? There was available time, and the thought of doing nothing filled me with fear.

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A friend once told me he noticed how I was careful with opening and closing doors — treating them with care, and aiming for quietness. It’s a thought I hold dear, because it was one of the first times I remember feeling truly seen in my adult life. He went on to wax philosophic, talking about it as “a good way to see who is practicing everyday mindfulness”. I think about this a lot.

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It finally happened a couple weeks ago. My streak of 8 years of not being injured finally came to an end.

The first couple of days of managing my body’s recovery were the most challenging — lots of hopping, RICE, and moving carefully. An ankle sprain is maybe one of the better injuries to have, I think, if I had to choose. It forced me to slow down. “How ridiculous,” I thought as I replayed the incident over and over, “a yoga and meditation teacher getting injured as he’s racing his kids to school”. Sometimes I think the expected traits of the characters I assign to myself often move me farther away from them. But I hadn’t been keeping up with my morning meditation practice… so, in a strange way, maybe my ankle was helping me make up for that lost practice time by slowing me down.

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I attended a virtual conference a couple weeks ago. It was for work, so both my observer mind and participant mind were in attendance. As I was running down the list of sessions, figuring out which spoke to me, one leapt off the page. It was called “How Many Mondays?” I’m a big believer in trusting my gut when I feel big reactions like this (thanks theater and yoga training, and this awesome podcast with Rudy), so I made sure to put it on my calendar.

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My son, Teddy, has started reading; piecing together words sound by sound. It’s a remarkable experience to witness, and makes me burst with pride.

This morning, when I asked him to practice reading the words on a note card from his teacher, he was game. The first 5 times Teddy “read” the sentence, it said “Teddy did all his work.” (See the attached photo to see what was actually written.) Despite a couple minutes of coaching to practice actually reading, he wasn’t interested, and wouldn’t hear that it said something else (though of course the message is similar).

How many times in my life have I behaved this way? When have I listened to or read something juuuusssssst well enough to make some guess as to what the transmitter was working to get across, without truly listening? I know I did this while learning to play the cello in elementary school. It was a lot more work to pay attention and play what was actually written on the page than to play what I imagined the piece to be. I was skimming the page and reading only what I THOUGHT was written.

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There’s a complexity to the human experience that, for me, often seems overwhelming when I attempt to communicate it. So many feelings come up about so many things so frequently, that the prospect of expressing anything in words and speech sometimes seems paltry. Even now, the thesaurus doesn’t have an answer for the exact state I’m working to get across.

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I was about 25 when I first heard about the idea of reciprocity. It seemed like a great idea from the cosmic lens — a spiritual, communal, light side version of “quid pro quo”. There was this Pilates training I hoped to do. I was earlier on in my career, and had much more time than money. The studio owner offered me the chance to join the training, and pay for it by working shifts managing the front desk for a number of months. It felt great to have another way to consider trading with someone else. Of course, the barter system only works in certain places and circumstances these days, but it was a relief to have a way to move forward that was out of the expected “ordinary”.

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We’re right in the middle of it. Past the beginning, somewhere before the end. Certainly, the end of things is in sight. Or maybe it isn’t. It’s as though we’re in this strange, nebulous, uncharted, hazy space of uncertainty. Well, at least we can say we’re somewhere in the middle. Somewhere meant to be transitory, not a permanent place to set up camp. We are definitely in a liminal space. That’s a fact... I think.

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