Kin

A few weeks ago, I was walking my son to daycare in the morning. He’s typically happy to go and we talk about every car that we see along the way (make and model), say hello to the birds and lament leaving our umbrellas at home. This day was no different. As soon as we got to the centre, however, quiet tears started falling from his eyes and he fell into my arms, sobbing. In the midst of comforting him, I tried to do the mental exercise of figuring out what went wrong (the answer is nothing; he’s a preschooler). We’re all allowed to have our bad days, and my usually happy-go-lucky kid decided today was his day.

As I took him into the classroom, something rather wonderful happened. All his classmates who were there suddenly ran over to him to ask him what’s wrong, to distract him with their toys and to give him a tissue. They all accompanied him to the window as he wiped his tears and waved goodbye to me.

A moment of community and kinship.

We don’t teach this outwardly. Perhaps innately we know we belong with others; we form groups all through life and we weave a net into which others can fall. Groups keep us safe.

I’ve been hearing for many years now about civility, and how nobody is civil with the other. Why don’t we all just get along anymore. What’s happened to society to create the kind of divisiveness that exists now. Why are people so polarized and why is there so much hurt. I have some theories (mostly to do with power, oppression, politics and money). But my other theory really is around kinship. We’ve perhaps stopped feeling a sense of responsibility toward one another. This exists in microcosms like libraries and places of worship, like political protests and soup kitchens. By and large however, we’ve stopped seeing others (and the world) as part of our collective responsibility. We’ve decided it’s much easier to send off a hurtful missive over text than it is to sit in our own discomfort for a minute. We’ve decided somewhat that diffuse action (or inaction in many cases) doesn’t amount to collective harm. I’m not vouching for harmful involvement - some people truly aren’t good for us at the time we’re in and distance is necessary for safety. Yes, absolutely.

However, we are all responsible for each other, the world, and our collective futures.

As I enter another year circling around the sun, our country is headed to the voting booths. The next few years will be determined by one party or another. And everyone is wondering how to vote strategically and in their own interest. I’ll be so bold as to say that we’re also voting with others in mind, and I would hope that we take responsibility for one another as we make that decision, no matter how much we may disagree on bits and pieces. I want your elders to have care, your children to have nice teeth and for your family to not have to pick between rent and food on any given month. We are only as good as how we take care of our most vulnerable. That’s what it means to be be human.

Every birthday for me is a question around what I want and how I want to be in this world. I want to continue to show up for my community. I want to be in song with it. I want to build new ways of being in kinship. Humanity is capable of such goodness; I want us to exploit our highest conscience in service of that. Don’t you?

A lovely poem from Debbie Millman (on The Marginalian)

TWENTY WAYS TO MATTER

Excavate the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth —
the deeper you go, the simpler it gets:
the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss —
all of it part of the same fabric,
all just a story
emerging from the quantum foam.

Move through the world
knowing that everyone around you
is doing the best they can,
that humanity is capable
of the Moonlight Sonata
and the concentration camp,
that you are a piece
of the same puzzle.

If you are longing for
the world to be more perfect
do something about it:
become a kind of translator
between reality and possibility,
cast a light on a parallel world,
that little speck in the distance —
it is the hope, it is the struggle, it is the reward.

Let go of the future
but hold on to the beautiful things
that, like music, exist outside of time —
the sense of wonder and love and light.

When the chord changes on you
what if you harmonized it?

The black hole of your devastation
is a wild strange expansive place.
We are really good at coming up
with reasons to not go there.
Go there.
You will find the seeds
that become galaxies of growth.
You will find
what the soul and the spirit and the heart
need to know.

Be on the inside of your heart,
make a home inside yourself,
for to keep other people happy
is distraction from the real work of being
in which there is no final test
for how to be human —
only the open question
of how to be yourself
which you must answer daily
with all the strength and kindness
that you’ve got.

And remember
that life is an extraordinary creative collaboration,
that if we keep shining a light
on the things that mean and matter the most
the light overcomes the darkness,
that love is the oldest light in the universe
and when you live and work and listen
with open-hearted love
everything
     everything
          everything
is possible
for your life.

Regenerate

Today I went out for a run - it is likely the last of the temperate winter sun before a cold snap plunges us back into the blue winter. It took all of my energy to get outside today because it feels like we’re only slipping into the year and it’s already getting away from us entirely.

I usually use my runs to tune out the world if I can and perhaps to noodle on some little issue or another or perhaps to sticky-note my own brain (remember, remember, remember). As I rounded the corner past the panoramic park on the edge of a hill, I noticed a low tree that was starting to sprout small fuzzy buds. And of course, the relief that spring is around the corner is always mixed with the kind of eco-dread that’s become prevalent in my mind the last few years. Climate change forcing new springs.

Yet I can’t help but be heartened by nature’s capacity to regenerate itself. It bends around, over, under, inside and out of the unnatural, folding our small tinkerbox creations into its vast and mossy arms. While we sit here fretting about missed deadlines and lists and Outlook (heaven help us), nature goes full gusto on yet another fabulous season.

Somedays it’s hard to be hopefully. Sometimes the moral arc (or whichever sort of arc you might want to call upon) seems to not bend, and perhaps even to retract when we feel like we’ve moved forward. But then I remember, that nature leans into stasis - a sense of equilibrium, always, always. And our ability to regenerate is a reflection of that nature.

Any big idea is a long game. In our small lifetimes we have created a lot of noise, the results of which we won’t fully see for many generations. But always there is the capacity to regenerate when things have fallen down - to create differently, maybe better, to take our communities along, and to draw from the deep well of nature’s ever proliferating fuzzy buds.

Things I’m reading/thinking about right now.

This is Love, a podcast hosted by Phoebe Judge

Becoming Wise, written by Krista Tippett (I’m pacing myself)

The Six Grounding Virtues, to think about early in this year

Create

This is a first draft. I’ve been away for too long - the “break” wasn’t a planned one. 2024 became so much about managing, keeping my head above the water. We had plans, checklists, calendars, work-back timelines. So much coordination, logistics, parenting (both of children and worse, adults). I simply had no time in between just checkboxes. I love a good list and the inherent joy that comes from a job-well-done.

The gap last year - and the thing that I missed the most - was messy creation. I stopped making things. I didn’t spend time writing anything but work (and even that was minimal). I didn’t make music. I mostly held crayons to draw all manner of rudimentary vehicle (how does one draw a motorcycle anyway?). I felt mostly like I was ingesting and spitting outputs.

Sometimes the season we’re in necessitates that we focus our energies on particular things. I have always been proud of my ability to manage a lot of things and people, but it doesn’t fill my bucket in the same way as cringey drawings and bad poetry did when I was younger. Which is why, this year, my Word is Create.

I’m taking my cue from nature - she creates everything every year in the spring. She’s intentional about it. She doesn’t worry about perfection or opinion. She simply does her thing and lets us enjoy the fruits (literal and metaphorical). No judgment.

I’m not expecting perfection (we’re working on that), but I want more presence. I might be here more often this year. Or I might not. In between all of the spreadsheets and the calendaring, there needs to be room to create. So much of it is just showing up and seeing what shows up with you. So, 2025 and I will show up together.

Care

It has taken me a few days/weeks to come around to my Word of the Year for 2024. To be honest, the last year, and the preceding ones have been difficult to process in so many ways. 2023 was the first year I spent as a working parent (or a parenting worker) - and let me tell you, it was a rough go. I managed it all by surviving (because I do it so well) and then crashed at the end of the year (there were many tears). There was a fatigue so deep, it was cellular and spiritual and there was no amount of self-care that would help me come out of it in a couple of days.

All the while, I was thinking about how I care about things. I cared a bit too much about things that didn’t need it (an email I forgot to send, internet rage) and not enough about the things that mattered (date nights, proper rest, walks with my small human). This compounded with the world that we live in - wars, climate change, interest rates, the neverending pandemic, oppressive systems - overwhelmed me (continuous headaches, insomnia, a body system that was blaring red signals). I had to bring it to a halt.

Care is structurally and spiritually vital. But there’s so much of it to go around and so many questions it surfaces. How far does our care extend beyond ourselves? To our families? Our communities? The world? And how much is in your bucket to care about all these things? How much of it is left for you? Maintaining your humanity is important - giving a shit is important. Being aware is important, but showing up is even more so than all those things combined. So then if you have a finite bucket of energy, how do you show up meaningfully as an extension of your care? And who or what are you having to sacrifice to do that?

There are no wrong answers here. All of us, in whatever humanity we have, care about something.

The things we care about are like the dials on a soundboard. We are constantly dialing up our levels of care on certain things, and dialing down on other things. This happens to be a negotiation daily on the micro- and macro- levels. We make a million decisions every day that help us define the sound that is the contours of that care.

In the last five years, I had forgotten to balance the dials. Some that had been turned up for decades were still on without serving a purpose. blaring in continuous noise - no sense of balance or harmony. And then I added to the mess by dialing up new ones. Perhaps I thought turning things all the way up would be a good way to measure the level of care I have for everything (more care is good, right?). Only it comes at a major cost on my own care. And if we’re all being honest, doing none of it well, and taking me away from myself.

So at the end of the year, I muted all the buttons except for the ones that were necessary (keeping myself alive). I focused on rest (naps daily), movement (walks), filling my bucket (reading) and reconnecting with the people who bring joy, energy and strength to me.

In 2024, I’m spending my year redefining how I show up in the world and how much care I put into the things that matter, that align with my values and that hopefully leave the world a better place, no matter how small that betterment might be.

I’ll say it again: Caring is important. It binds us together as one common humanity (albeit with a trillion differences). How you care impacts how you present in the world. And not all things deserve to be cared about in the same way at the same time - and especially not if they’re costing you deeply (and resulting in your caring less overall). The world needs us to care, but we must be methodical and thoughtful about it so we can have the impact we want.

That’s my focus this year. Getting the dials right.

A few things to read/listen to:
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagosky

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

James Bridle “The Intelligence Singing All Around us” on the On Being Podcast

More Light

I drink my coffee is relative darkness in the morning. The sun is hardly up when I’m up, and, if I’m unlucky enough, it’s pitch black outside many months. I love the light, but moving at the pace of the sun at that time seems more in line with where I’d like to me. After all, the brain is still a fog and the sparks are only starting to take.

My toddler, however has a different idea these days. He is close on my tail after I wake up and is ready to start the day within minutes of my last sip of coffee. Lately he walks around the house, fingers on both hands coming together in a little bow shape - the signal for “more” in baby sign language (that he picked up entirely on his own). “More…light,” he says, making me switch on the kitchen track lights. “More light” in the dining room. “More light” the second lamp in the living room. In a few seconds the entire open floor of our house is luminescent.

I’m not sure where this sudden need for light, the request for it, the demand for it has come from recently. Perhaps he’s testing the bounds of his communication, perhaps he’s testing his boundaries, or perhaps he just wants to see his toys better. In any case, he seems a whole lot happier with every lamp in the house lit - while I nervously wring my hands at the electricity bill.

I’ve always thought about light as the overarching concept that we all strive for (enlightenment, anyone?). From its origins in myth and religion (my favourite verse of the Quran has to do with light) to how it permeates our daily language (“after this week, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel'“ and “he is a luminary in his field”). It is entrenched deep in our poetry and literature, in our music and in our sports (the Olympic flame).

Light all on its own is a destructive force, however. Something we quickly realize when fires rage, volcanic ash lights up the night sky or we experience eternal sun. There are times when dark is necessary, meditative and even healing. The dark is cyclically part of illumination and to have one only is a disservice and a detriment.

The thing about light is that it can necessarily change our perception of the thing that we’re illuminating. Where once the contours of something might have been an object of the mind, only by some sense, bringing it to light shows us those contours, highlights the crags, the surfaces - whether we like it or not. It changes how we might interact with that object permanently. The dark is sometimes a richer sensory experience.

All this to say is that we can yield both light and dark judiciously. We can alter what we present and how it’s perceived. And perhaps that’s just what makes up the basis of power in this world. So if light holds such power (as does dark), it’s maybe our collective responsibility to enable light in others - to show a better way.

My son might not know it, but his request for light in the morning is a signal to me that a whole day of hope, learning, chance, breath or rest waits for us. He’s saying “light up, we have things to do.” And whether that means doing the alphabet puzzle or just watching the morning through the window, we can see the world starting to move. And perhaps it’s also a sign that we all need more light to change things.

A couple of things I’ve been reading/listening to:
How Dark the Beginning by Maggie Smith

The Light that Bridges the Dark Expanse between Lonelinesses by Maria Popova

A Village

I recently decided on a whim to take some time off from social media - namely, Instagram. With the business of work, life, raising Alligator and a ludicrous news cycle, I found myself at the edge of meltdown. I had lost my sense of self and centredness. I decided, on a whim, that one month was absolutely the right amount of time I needed away.

After letting the impulse jitters subside, I realized that tranquility and loneliness are closely tied. While I had the time and space to read or even just to go about the business of my day uninterrupted, I missed the relationships that I’ve fostered over the last however many years it’s been. I missed ex-colleagues that I share inside jokes with; old friends - a few from other social media sites - who I share so much history with; new friends who I have had the absolute pleasure of getting to know recently; and so many parents who are all in the same boat of raising their kids in a complicated world.

I didn’t realize that the small glimpses we have into each others’ lives are sometimes the breath I need in the middle of the day. A chuckle at a ridiculous meme my sister sent me or a really interesting article or a gorgeous poem. These are the things that buoy us, pulsing through the (frankly) daily struggle that some days can be. They are the way in which we say, “Hi, this made me think of you, which means I thought about you during the course of my day.” Though it’s a silly joke, someone cared enough to think, “I know the exact person who will appreciate this.”

They say it takes a village to raise a child. While it’s not the village of my grandmother, where you could leave your kids with the neighbour and come back to find them fed and playing in the garden, our online communities are a makeshift village. They enable and catalyze that most basic of human drives: the need for connection. And in these cataclysmic (it seems) days, I think an awful lot about collective responsibility - how we owe it to each other to keep each other safe and human. Certainly that’s not what we have seen in recent years in the news cycle, but we’ve seen it in a myriad of miraculous pockets of humanity. How we come through in countless big and small ways for each other. If we are not for each other, then what are we for?

There is a loneliness epidemic for so many people in all walks of life and at all stages. We also receive the messages that social media can be too much, and that it can exacerbate this loneliness. And we also see how it can serve as a community to uplift. All of those things can be true (I’ve learned that part of being a grownup is holding space for multiple seemingly contradictory truths and I don’t like it one bit). But like anything in this world, everything has two sides and it’s up to us to determine what the balance of the two looks like in our lives.

I think breaks are good - it’s nice to look up once in a while at the wide world. I also think I’m in the process of renegotiating my relationship with all things social - perhaps fewer junk news cycles and more rich connections. One thing I do know is that I missed my village. While we might not be neighbours and while I might not see some of them for years likely (I hope not, but it’s realistic), I know their presence is a deeply embedded part of who I am. They make me who I am and reflect it back to me in countless ways. There’s value and care in that.

Reconnect

It’s new year’s eve and as usual, nothing has gone as we hoped it would. We’ve all been hit by a wave of illnesses that has swept us off our feet. And so we’re sitting here, in pajamas, after having some takeout. And truth be told, I’ll likely be asleep in a couple of hours as my body continues to heal after three years of not having had anything to deal with.

But very much as usual, I’ve also been thinking about my word of the year. 2022 felt…gelatinous. I felt like trying to wade through the mire I couldn’t see clearly through. My motions felt slow, but I felt out of breath at the same time. Sitting down made me dizzy in any case.

In the perpetual motion of the year, life became very cyclical. Our son continues to grow and do things that both delight and frustrate us (truly how many crackers can one person throw on the ground). Life is a never-ending cycle of bedtimes, snacktimes, work, miscommunications, hurried dinners and Jeopardy before bed. It was only when I revisited an old picture recently that I realized that something had changed. The woman staring back at me reflected light; she was smiling through whatever might be her own personal problems. She carried herself different. Something had changed, perhaps something been lost. Me.

In this season of life I’m an instagram bio: Wife, mother, daughter, sister, leader. I’m many things to many people. My proverbial plate is full. And my greatest desire right now is to be myself. This year has required an identity overhaul that has necessitated that I fit into the fulfil these roles. And somewhere in there, the joy and deep well of knowing, the signal that brings me back to myself has been muffled.

So I’m dedicating this year to reconnecting - both with myself and with my community. I’m committing to do one thing for myself a week that isn’t about anyone else, no matter how small. This isn’t a resolution so much as a calling in to myself again. I want to go back to this year many years for now and see myself again - with that deep sense of knowing that I knew before now.

I think a part of calling myself back is also reconnecting with the wonderful people in whose orbit I’m so lucky to be. While I’ve got an army of new mom friends, I’ve got an equally powerful contingent of friends who have been with me for a long time - parent or not. And part of connecting with them is that they remind me who I am. As an introvert, I love spending time by myself - I’m my own richest source of connect. But a bell doesn’t ring itself. I’ve been lucky to make so many new friends this year from other experiences and I’m looking forward to letting some of my latent connections regrow this year.

We sometimes need to contract a little bit until we figure a few things out before we expand again. Things require effort and energy and often, we don’t have infinite amounts of either. But well-placed and well-intentioned, that effort reaps rewards for everyone involved. So it is with gratitude for this contraction that I enter into the next phase of this season.

I hope 2023 gives you the space you need to reconnect with what you’d like.

Where We Live

The other night, while we were settling in for dinner, my partner asked me in passing, “Would you say that you’re happier now with me and our son than you were before us?” I had to think about for several moments. The answer wasn’t a resounding “yes” for me. The question was much deeper than a glib affirmative, even though that would make everyone feel better. It wasn’t a big “no” either. The joy of these two men who are riotous and loving is simply nothing I’ve experienced before. What can I compare it to anyway?

The easiest way to see life is as a continuum. After all, we are born and then every day we age incrementally. Our limbs grow, our brains grow, what we can do also grows (and then perhaps shrinks all the same at the end). We assume that every year, we’ll have something to which we can compare our previous years. Am I happier this year than last? Do I have more money? Am I stronger? Do I have more or fewer friends? And sometimes these are easier comparisons than not. You’d know if you had less money. That’s not hard.

Where the whole premise falls apart is when we start to account for experiences. As I get older, I realize that experiences are more like rooms in which we live. The structure around the room is likely the same - there is a roof, four walls, and likely a floor. What the room contains though might be markedly different. Objectively comparing the bathroom to the kitchen won’t make sense. They are two different rooms with two different purposes (hopefully!)

And so as we look at our lives as a series of experiences, it becomes harder to objectively make comparisons. My twenties and thirties were a great time of getting to know myself and often to test the limits of my own capabilities. With it came the sorting out of various feelings, perhaps retiring things that didn’t serve me and preparing myself to see life going forward with a bit of wisdom rather than a life that just happens. I had no comparison for what having a child might feel like, or being a manager, or thinking about my old age in reference to those I might leave behind. I didn’t know the joy of wandering through a bookshop with my spouse or introducing mango to my child. Am I happier? More tired? Who’s to say? I’m a different person now with experiences that are different.

I live in a different room.

Rebecca Solnit puts it well:

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is understood to be a matter of having a great many ducks lined up in a row — spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences — even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable…
The problem may be a literary one: we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower — and wither — all around us.

Even those who live out the best version of the familiar story line might not find happiness as their reward. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles. But I wouldn’t call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person — honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope.

Perhaps this is why I have a hard time generalizing, especially as I get older. It’s a matter of language. Happiness is nebulous and doesn’t encompass the nuances that we live in our lives, the colour of each day. I’m maybe more hopeful, less fearful, less rigid, more thoughtful - and these can all change with the passage of time. Those things are too deep to be contained in a single word. My room is not one thing.

This week I turn 40. I know time is arbitrary in a sense, but we must at least follow the crowd in a way. 40 is a different room. I don’t know the lay of the land here yet, but it will have its own creaking floors. The light will come in a bit differently during the day, and I might have to add or take away a few things to feel like I can live here. Only time will tell of course. These are not things that come suddenly.

As for happiness, it’s much too broad a brush with which to paint life. It’s also a bit of a fool’s errand - and maybe a disservice to narrate a life well lived. And so we’ll move forward with that understanding. And things will seemingly get more complex and the answers won’t be brief. I maintain that life is deceptively simple - the meaning we ascribe is what matters in the end.

For today though, I’ll see the smile on my family’s face as they wait for me to read the birthday card they got for me. And perhaps later, we’ll all have some double chocolate fudge cake that my mother has baked for me since I was a little one. Indeed, perhaps some things never change.

April Morning

BY JONATHAN WELLS

You are living the life
you wanted as if you'd known
what that was but of course
you didn't so you'd groped
toward it feeling for what
you couldn't imagine, what
your hands couldn't tell you,
for what that shape could be.

This Sunday the rain turns cold
again and steady but the window
is slightly open and there is the vaguest
sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps
between the buildings because it's spring
the calendar says and the room where
you are reading is empty yet full
of what loves you and this is the day
that you were born.

Grace Notes

I recently had a few hours to myself one evening. The boys were up to their own devices and so I had the privilege of spending the rare leisure time how I wanted. I ended up watching a Netflix documentary called “Count Me In.” It focused on drummers from different famous bands talking about their craft, how they came to it and the human connection music provides for them and their audiences. At one point, things got a little technical and one of the interviewees mentioned grace notes.

For those unfamiliar, grace notes are embellishment notes that are annotated above the line of music. They are there simply to add interest to the music without interrupting the rhythm and the final destination that the music is headed toward. Grace notes can be sung or played and sometimes, as with drumming, simply a way to help mark the music. They don’t significantly change anything but add a little flourish so that things don’t become too monotonous.

So of course, the idea of grace notes stuck with me and percolated while I washed dishes and took my shower. How do grace notes materialize in our lives? Or rather, can we use the concept to illustrate the significance of our lives in some way?

Our lives have a rhythm of their own. We mark the passage of time, like today, with the new year. We have milestones and goals we like to meet. Our days take on the brush-teeth-eat-breakfast type of thrum. For the most part, even when no day is the same, every day is the same. It is truly the grace notes - the conversations we have, the funny thing that happened, the bit of gossip or a thought we had - that make life interesting. And so I’ve decided that this year with its oodles of time and time not enough, would be ideal to start capturing some of these grace notes. Mostly, they might be thoughts I have or questions that I’m working through. I hope to use it as an exercise to help me write, but also to help us all think a little deeper. When everyday becomes the same, we start missing the embellishments that make our lives interesting. Like I said, I have the time now, even though, I really don’t.

I’ll capture the grace notes as often as I can in a separate section here. I hope you’ll read. And perhaps you might try to write your own.

In the meantime, this quote spoke to me the other day and I think it perfectly sums up this idea:

“To be a good storyteller, one must be gloriously alive. It is not possible to kindle fresh fires from burned-out embers. The best of the traditional storytellers are those who live close to the heart of things0to the earth, sea, wind and weather. They have known solitude, silence. They have given unbroken time in which to feed deeply, to reach constantly for understanding.”

— Ruth Sawyer

If you want to learn more about the Netflix documentary, you’ll find a trailer here.

Year End Thoughts

At the beginning of every year, I pick a word that will frame what I want to do and embody for the year. It’s an idea I borrowed from my friend Sameer Vasta and it helps me go into the year with a sort of philosophical hook on which to hang my hat.

2021 was an exception. I knew the word, but I didn’t write about it.

In 2021, I had picked the word “Expand” because it meant so many things all at once. You see, this was the year that my husband and I had our first child - a boy.

I spent a good part of the year nurturing life - a feat I didn’t think I would ever want to undertake for many reasons. And yet here we were, buying baby clothes and an entire house in which we could home this new person.

“Expand” became a more poignant motto for my year than anything. As I physically changed, the meaning of who I was also expanded. My son - and it still feels very odd to use the phrase - will eventually call me mum (or mummy, or mama). And I have to ask myself what that means to me and to him. I’ve brought him into this world, but I don’t own him. Even as a parent, I still see myself as a steward or a guide. I’m entrusted with something invaluable and it is up to me - and up to us - to guide him in this world to become a good person and a decent human being. That qualitatively changes what I have to think of myself - I must be a better person for him. That gives me anxiety on most days.

2021 has been a year that the work world is calling “The Great Resignation.” People are literally taking stock of their lives and quitting things - jobs especially - that no longer serve them. Employers are having to pivot to accommodate workers who no longer put work at the front and centre of their lives and identity. After all, things that don’t grow, decay over time (which is also a natural part of life). I think The Great Resignation is much more than that. It’s also parting with the people we no longer want to be. Meaning-making has never been more apparent than right now. And people no longer want to bargain the value of their lives down to a pittance. In a way, we’ve expanded what we want to be, regardless of what that looks like. It’s a risk - but it’s a good risk, I think (and I speak from a place of privilege - the pandemic has been brutal to women and people of colour, especially. We have a lot to do to close this gap of inequity).

2022 might be much of the same journey. We’re still contending with a global pandemic. Our healthcare system continues to be strained. Many of us are working from home. It’s hard to expand in an environment like that. But perhaps constraint fosters creativity. We can’t move outward, so we must move more deeply. Perhaps that depth, and the kindness, quiet and thoughtfulness that should come with it is what we need to expand into. We must care - or continue to care. Or start caring.

I’m minutes away from my son waking up. He’s stirring on the baby monitor. His small body is growing out of the cute clothing we bought him and he keeps lodging himself sideways in his bassinet. He won’t be little for long - he’ll expand too. He’s changing every day. As he changes, so will I. I don’t know what it’ll look like even a month from now, or a year from now. All I know is it will all be different more quickly than I’d ever imagined.

Some things to read if you’d like:

The only metric of success that really matters is one we ignore - Quartz

How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity and the Making of My Family - by Sonora Jha

Does anyone want to hear about burned out moms anymore? - The Cut