The Grace of Discomfort
discomfort gets my attention, thank god!
As Original BB, my five year old, encounters public school for the first time, I reckon with so many intersecting beliefs and feelings - from my own childhood, and about how our society works. I’m revisiting my heartbreak around how capitalism interrupts connection and connectedness at so many levels. It forces us to be separate from loved ones for so many hours a day, to consume plastic-suffocated quick food, to ignore the suffering of others in other places to get through our immediate daily obligations, to make all kinds of concessions we know are not good for us in our specific human bodies and us in our planet body.
At the same time I’m noticing, incredibly, us humans find our ways back to each other, stay connected sometimes, and create immense beauty and magic. I’m noticing how many people make a beautiful life amidst all kinds of situations that are devastating to our ecological / emotional / spiritual bod(y)ies. For example, yesterday, when waiting for an appointment in the car after school, Original BB started playing with the seat belt as a gear shifter and made a world for himself in which he was delighted. Sitting in the car can be sitting in the car or it can be on a mental adventure. Duly noted transformations of a moment I want to practice myself more.
I’m so deep in a question I’ve been in for the entirety of my parenting life. It was a question I had before I was a parent, but becoming one has made it feel much more foregrounded and much more difficult. The question is what is mine to create for him, to filter and edit for him, what is mine to do for him and what is not. Sometimes I long for an expert which doesn’t exist, to tell me how to answer that question.
It’s not that parenting experts don’t exist, it’s that their scope is pretty limited. It’s that no one else can answer that question for us, because no one else has the child we have, no one else has the life circumstances we have. We can apply principles from others’ wisdom but the application is up to us and constantly alive and shifting, as we all grow. It also cannot be answered in a sweeping claim, in my abstract philosophical thinking. It is answered as it is lived, day by day.
So I’m grounding myself with this right now - recently something someone said I’ve kept very close. They were talking about being in difficult circumstances, feeling really uncomfortable in their life. They said when they feel this certain discomfort, they say to themself,
“This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.”
Like, this is my opportunity. This is my moment to be with this, to not turn away, to outlast it, to be brave with it. To transform by simply staying.
Yet again, I have been practicing with this (and you have probably heard this kind of thing from me a million times, in fact this and all my writing is mostly the story of me forgetting and then remembering the truth I always needed and knew.)
I’ve been very intentional about not staying in the not knowing for too long. Cause as someone with three air planets I can stay in the swirl of all the ideas, all the perspectives and it is often a place of overwhelm-suffering. THIS IS THE MOMENT I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR serves as a cue for me to land in my body and land in an hypothesis. A working one. Like, you don’t have to know forever, but you need to know enough, to commit enough to go through the day in a grounded way, to interact with others in a reliable and loving way, to be not just a mind but also a heart, a being, a breather. The discomfort is a cue that embodiment is calling, that I need to land from air down to earth.
Doing this paradoxically gives me more options, less swirling, more simple and gentle and specific move-making that is responding to the present, not to abstract concepts. This! OOOOOhhhhhh. This IS the moment I’ve been waiting for because it’s my cue to return to living here and now. It’s my cue to not miss the moment because I’m worrying about controlling the moment. My attention is salvaged from abstraction into Now by the grace of the discomfort, Because the discomfort gets my attention. But only if I remember THIS IS THE MOMENT I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR.
If this sounds circular that’s because it is! Thanks for joining me in my circle/spiral for a moment hahahaha.
One other thing before I go —
There are only a few things I’ve been doing (almost) my entire life and one of them is studying astrology. Coming up on my 30 year anniversary of that practice (!) in my life and my favorite way to share it right now is with parents, as a tool that brings more compassion and curiosity to the difficult, magical, humbling task of parenting. I’m doing that in an IN PERSON WORKSHOP FORM IN SAN FRANCISCO THIS SUNDAY September 22 at the SF Birth Center. I’m so excited to be together and talk astrology and parenting and being a person on planet earth with you. I do hope you’ll join us if you’re in the bay. Here’s a link to get tickets, and if you come with a friend it’s cheaper!
Wishing you connection with the arrival of whatever moment you’ve been waiting for,
Sarah
PS I have astrology reading spots open in October!