I’d Rather

Friends,

An entire decade of looking down and finding ourselves warped by politics, ideology, and twisted realities. It feels foreign to not know what it means to choose a side. Whether it is an election, human rights extinguished, or a war waged on other lands, we have a thousand roads before us and we keep having to navigate them with and without one another. We are all screaming into our bullhorns and it’s all noise, noise, noise.

I would be dishonest with myself if I did not admit to contributing to the noise. And nothing feels quite like a disruption in the rush to speak than a quick dismantling of a close relationship.

All over again, I recognize how painful it is to feel a relational rupture with someone you care about. Like standing in the street during an earthquake the moment felt disorienting and deeply uncomfortable. I walked away, wordless and feeling rather helpless. I wondered if I had just witnessed the end of a friendship I’ve enjoyed or perhaps, I hoped it was a misunderstanding. I took a day to reset and find an equilibrium. I wanted a reconciliation that most likely wouldn’t come.

In these moments, I learned something new about myself. I found that I’d rather claim sadness than anger. In this case, well, I was sad. Most of my life has been spent turning myself over to anger as a default. The work I’ve been doing – choosing humanity in the face of hostility – has led me to see that beneath it all is a soil of sadness. The anger, weeds. The weeds I’ve endlessly lost myself in both figuratively and literally. The anger, as always, can be justified away but I’d rather see myself through.

Emotions are physiological cascades that want to complete their cycles, and they will complete those cycles when you allow them to. They want to be travelers, not residents. They want to move on. Let them.

It seems amid the noise, we rarely find this soil; the sadness that exists beneath the weeds in our own little gardens. The gardens that once felt rich and bountiful because so much could coexist together in one place.

Ten years is a long time to allow the weeds to grow.

There are times, like this, I don’t know the way through besides trying to look inward. Understanding where I might be creating too much noise (often, unfortunately). Reminding myself I’d rather to not be too far removed from the soil and branches of the olive tree.