Today’s journaling / reflection prompt: What are the seasons of your life? How do you demarcate the phases you go through, the age you feel, and make sense of your own journey on a continuum? (Are you satisfied with your answer? What’s here now? And what’s ahead?)
In a long dormant zest for spring cleaning that overtook my entire body and mind in one fell swoop one late warm Sunday evening, I recovered a post-it.
In the hierarchy of post-its, it was a winner.
I post-it often and haphazardly, not to organize thoughts, but to leave little sticky, scribbly breadcrumbs for future me to discover and revel in. I buy them in bulk, in all shapes and colors. I jot down passing thoughts, quotes, turns of phrases I like, new words or concepts, book recommendations, moments observed. A character I want to hold onto in my mind a little longer. A fleeting feeling that feels a little less oblique if I just put some words to it.
All in all, they’re generally ideas for writing that I sincerely hope will inspire some distant future version of me, the one who will be more organized, more knowing, to maybe finally do something with all these pieces of ideas accumulating in dusty corners and slipped between book covers.
There’s some (questionable) method to the post-it madness: if after the fermentation period of said post-it (between when I write it and when I rediscover it, flipping through books or say, finally sweeping the back edges of the wall behind my desk when I’m moving cross-country and packing my life up) I discover that the meaning still holds true, it is a Good Post-It. Some spark in the sparse words has aged well and continue to cause me to think on it more, I will typically muse on it some more before breathing new life into it.
Sometimes I’ll keep one in my journal, for what will most likely be life. Other times, it’s complete gibberish, and goes to the recycling. (Take, for example, the one that simply said “videos” with an underline. Or any I’ve tried to write in the dark to capture some brilliant idea in dreams. These often turn out to be equally garbage - not to mention harder to interpret than dreams.)
Now, when a post-it matures like the fine wine past-me intends it to be, it’s simply magic.
The post-it in question simply read,
“- season of minor calamities”
All of a sudden, I tunnel down the suggestive peek through a portal to emerge, momentarily, whole and seeing, at a universe I had forgotten or cast aside. A vision of the world, a way of feeling in life that younger me understood. Like the smell of a long-forgotten favourite childhood meal or that one song played on repeat that one summer, a Good Post-It is a recurring time machine.
The “season of minor calamities” occurred soon after my mentor had introduced the concept of “seasons in our lives” to me - the thought that in different phases of adulthood, different priorities would sway us in divergent directions, and we would react accordingly based on whichever “season” we were in. As in, “some seasons, you need more help from others; and in other times, you may be the one to offer the help.”
I was turning a new age and felt older beyond anything I would ever be old enough to experience. I never imagined myself at this age that I am now. Sure, I could see well into retirement, happy old woman with her balding head and squeaky rolling shopping cart spending hours at the grocery store because she could — but everything before then has always been a blank.
The chat with my mentor opened up those weeks before my birthday to a new kind of experience, of seeing into the peripheries. It wasn’t just the “season where I felt old.” Soon, new observations emerged that felt truer to what I actually experienced in life, instead of the catch-all broad feeling of disassociation that kept me from seeing the details.
It was a season of wanting to test everything with my hands. Of seeing a tree and wanting to touch the leaves. It was a season where a leaf was just a leaf, and didn’t represent other things it would go on to be, like freedom or guilt. It was a season of obsessively reaching out to people, of reconnecting and see how far I could push the inevitable trailing off that gives way to Life happening.
It was a season of wanting, for the first time in my life, to decorate my home in a permanent way. I yearned to paint. To drill nails and hang up large structures. To break down non-weight bearing walls and to look up how to find them. To buy substantial furniture that would last me the next few decades. (I did none of those things but it was a season of wanting, not doing.)
It was a season of great love and it was a season of minor calamities.
For what felt like weeks but was only probably a handful of days, I became a passive destructive force around the home - and with me. I broke two dishes, then another. I skinned my knee and scratched my arm and bruised my leg up and down from merely moving around the home, accidentally colliding with what must have been every piece of structured immovable material in my way - chairs, plants, walls, corners and doors. For fear of drowning a fern plant, I killed it from lack of water. Then the orchid died. Then another.
I laughed it off then as some subconscious but willful rebellion against lockdown. I’m still not sure what to make of it, other than that the apartment - my new home - must have sensed an intruder, and I, too, was adjusting.
Almost as soon as I wrote it on the post-it, everything stopped. The rest of the plants survived, then started thriving. I bought new dishes and stopped breaking them. I’ve moved all the “dangerous” furniture.
By labeling it as a season, I know that time will soon transform it, and I will move onto the next phase. It was a way to demarcate a time when I felt like I was floating.
Everything was “minor”; everything was actually ok. But when I found the post-it, seeing the word “calamities” written out, I suddenly felt a rush of bittersweet sadness: this younger self was exploring and trying to understand the texture of solitude and what it means to feel alone even when surrounded by great love. I am still learning this today.
In another season where I feel afloat and drifting, I keep the post-it near my desk as a reminder of hope - that I’ll continue making sense of the seasons as they come and go.
Margin Notes
Hello dear friend,
It’s been a while and I hope you are well! I’ve thrown my sending schedule to the wind as we go for more spontaneity in a time that seems to depend on it. Summer has always been full of “wandering & wondering” for me, and this one is no different. Today’s essay was strange to write and full of trying. Both in the sense it was “trying” and it feels like I “tried really hard” which is always a bad thing with writing, haha. “Effortful” is what comes to mind.
But it felt good to try to put some words around this limbo feeling I’ve had for a while, and to keep searching where it’s coming from - and more importantly, where it’s going. Have you ever had that experience? To look for something you’re not sure is missing yet?
I probably need a hobby other than writing & stewing..!
Grateful as ever to have this space to share a bit of my world and to hear from yours. <3
Until next time, be well, sending you big hugs, Kerri
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