I love snow! I know, soooo many people hate it. But its so beautiful, peaceful, quiet, calming. My favorite is watching those giant flakes float gently to the ground, watching it centers me, brings me peace, and helps me feel grounded. But snow interrupts. It doesn’t matter if you live somewhere that gets a lot or a little, it always disrupts the flow of modern life because we need to move! We need to be places: work, school, the gym, the grocery store, wherever. And snow interrupts the ability to move freely. We are forced to pause and deal with it.
Isn’t that life though? We keep moving, filling our lives with more and more and more until something comes along and forces us to deal with all that we are running from. A friend recently shared a post on instagram that said “Sit with it. instead of drinking it away, smoking it away, sleeping it away, eating it away, or running from it ... sit with it. Healing happens by feeling.” (Original post by @twinflame.connections on Instagram, Jan 23, 2021) This is what snow does, it creates the image of a soft, quiet, pure world that forces us to pause in it. So lets pause together. Take a deep breath, in and out, again slowly.
Embrace this moment to pause.
Let the chaos stop.
Stop numbing yourself for a moment.
Feel it.
Feel it.
Feel it?
The process of feeling and releasing pain is such a brutal and beautiful process. Mental and emotional injury is much like physical injury, when we neglect to have a sprained joint, or broken bone, attended to in a timely fashion the problem gets much worse. But because the physical symptoms of our mental/emo injury, or pain, are easy to deny, we neglect them, self medicate them, try to out run them. Which works for a little while, but eventually later arrives and with it the consequences of our neglected pain. This is why we need snow days to force us to pause, change rhythm, and release. And probably a little bit of why so many people hate them.
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The truth about humans is that we don’t want to change until it is more uncomfortable to stay the same. It doesn’t matter how miserable we are in our circumstances, the known is still safer and more comfortable than the unknown. So the way to keep comfortable is to choose change, to decide that it is good, and to embrace it.
Wait, what!?! I know, it’s contradictory. But do you really want to wait until you are completely miserable before you make that change? Doing everything you can to keep everything the same, even though you are thoroughly miserable? I call this “Comfortably Miserable” and we all land there at various times for various reasons. Sometimes we land there because of choices we’ve made that have caused us to give up the ability to get ahead of the change. Sometimes we land there because we need this relationship to be as perfect as we imagine it to be. Sometimes we land there because of analysis paralysis. But the day comes and we must get unstuck! We either recognize that our misery is greater than our comfort, or the catastrophic event occurs, knocking every piece of comfort loose.
So how do you embrace change? I find its a two fold process, on one side you are celebrating the new, exploring, engaging, and entering into the possible. On the other side you are grieving what is being lost. With all change there is loss, in letting go of what isn’t working anymore; remember that holding on to these elements so that you don’t have to feel loss can cause more damage. Most of us focus on one or the other when going through change. The sunny adventurer celebrates all of the new possibility, seeming to not notice the pain of the loss of all that they leave behind. While the fearful avoid change and focus on all the horrible aspects of it, the loss, the unknown, the pain, the fear. The truth is that during the process of change we need to honor both: celebrating the new, grieving the loss. It is not always an easy path, but living with this awareness sure beats being miserably comfortable.
