2015: Emerging

Last year was quite a roller coaster. The tragic grand finale was the loss of my father to heart failure, after 20 years of serious health problems. His funeral was December 27th. We had lost mom to cancer only 18 months prior. Having focused on the care of my parents for so long, ushering in a new year feels a bit like emerging from a cave after three years. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it or what to expect.

I had not planned to engage in popular new year preparations like making resolutions, poking fun at resolutions, setting intentions (so as to avoid calling them resolutions) or choosing a word for the coming year as a theme or focus. Still reeling from the past few especially difficult weeks, I felt ill-prepared to do any of those things and was hardly in the mood to sign up for some clever word-choosing app or Start Your New Year Right workshop or another of the tiresome offers flooding my email and heavily promoted on social media.

Quite by accident (or perhaps not at all by accident, depending on your feelings about such things...) I came upon a comment in a Facebook group in which a friend shared that she had selected the word "emerge" for 2015. Her chosen word met unexpected resonance within me. After a day or two of pondering, I decided to adopt it, as well. Word or no word, 2015 will necessarily be--in at least some ways--a year of emergence for me. I'm still feeling too sad at this point to describe myself as excited about that, but I am, at the very least, curious about how things will unfold.

I had been the one member of our family to miraculously avoid the colds and flu so many struggled with in November and December. By January, however, the weeks of worry and not sleeping enough had taken their toll on my immune system, and by the evening of January 1st, I was quite ill.

Not being able to keep food down for the first 48 hours of the new year is a bit like getting that first ding on your brand new car the same day you drive it off the lot. It's terribly distressing in the moment, but, once you get past it, there's almost a sense of relief that you've gone ahead and gotten it over with. The pressure for everything to remain perfect as long as possible has already been relieved.

Ironically, I had made a renewed commitment to self-care immediately after dad's death. I tried to take proper care of myself before dad died, for that matter, but when you are dealing with intense situations, as we were in dad's final months, there are limits to what is reasonable or even possible. There is no shortage of people telling you to take care of yourself, of course, but generally those reminders are unhelpful, at that point.

Rather than constantly weighing the deluge of advice from outside sources, I'm making an effort to better tune in to what my own body and spirit are telling me. In an effort to do just that, when I got sick on New Year's Day, I really tried to pay attention. Did I need water? Rest? Stillness? Activity? Music? Quiet? Darkness? Warmth?

Thankfully, I am feeling much better, now, but I want to continue to tune in to what is mostly likely to keep me on a path of health and wholeness, moving forward. A useful question for me to consider periodically has been, "What are the lessons in this?" I'm learning that asking myself in a compassionate rather than judgmental way yields far more useful information. So far, the answers apply to getting over a virus as well as to the process of grieving:

Go slowly.

Be gentle.

Deep breaths.

Plenty of water.

Be selective.

Small bites/portions/steps.

Rest often.

Take care.

Use as much (or as little) support as needed.

Keep listening.

When you have spent a long while deep inside a cave, and it's finally time to head back out into civilization, with its bright lights and changing weather conditions, surely the list above is worth being mindful of, as you emerge.