Dating : Happy Ranniversary

On January 31st, I celebrated my very first Ranniversary. Three hundred and sixty-five days, nearly one thousand five hundred miles, and four pairs of shoes. Almost five.

A year ago, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, I was struck with an awful feeling. It wasn’t emptiness, though I did feel as though something in me was down to its last drop. It wasn’t ennui, though I once tried to do a load of laundry with my eyes closed just to feel alive. I was alarmingly successful.

For six years, life had been very full, sopping wet with color and chaos and noise, dragging my attention in six different directions, growing inside, then around me. Bit by bit, it began to change. The urgent pushes and pulls of parenting softened to the occasional nudge, the perfume that binds babies to their mothers started to wander off on the backyard breeze. I don’t know when it started, I was too busy hacking my way through the overgrowth to notice when the canopy began to lift. When it did, there was a vast, aching space. Instead of relishing in its freedom, I was frightened by its breadth. I forgot who I was without someone shouting it at me. I couldn’t figure out where to go unless it was tugging at my pant leg. I wasn’t I didn’t know what to do with the big, quiet, vacancy so I ran straight into it. I went one and half utterly exhausting miles to the butcher shop and home again.

I’ll spare you the minutiae of a very privileged lady’s quest to know herself, but mile by mile, I did pick up the odd thing. I discovered the satisfaction of starting the day in the bare-knuckled, blister-toed throes of a good fight. I became a better mother, a better partner, and way better pedestrian. I adopted a new mantra “Just keep going, try not to hurt yourself.” Or rather, I finally said it out loud.

The weightier revelations though (and it pains my bratty self-indulgent soul to say this) haven’t been about me at all, they’ve been everybody else. If there had to just one, it would be this:

Human beings are wildly, tenaciously, and wonderfully good.

And at this point, I couldn’t unbelieve it if I tried.

It’s easy to forget when you stare into a screen and pretend that it’s a window, when most of the lessons you learn about humanity come from a computer. Once you walk out the door though, the evidence is everywhere. It reaches out and slaps my hand as I hobble past the bus shelter, it drops its putter, hops the fence at the ninth green and runs along beside me for a bit shouting “Go, go, go!”, it smiles at me again and again. I figured running would be good for my heart, but I had no idea.

I read that nobody cared about the planet then just a day later, found myself standing in the green shadow of a Sprite bottle litter wreath. I heard an interview with a politician and wondered if we were tender anymore. That afternoon, I watched a very large man in an Iron Maiden shirt slip little boots onto his dog’s feet. I convinced myself, one online thread at a time, that we’d stopped showing up for each other, but later somebody offered me water, told me about the snake up ahead, and stood to the right so I could pass on the left. I’ve seen too many parents stopping to let their toddlers blow the whiskers from a dandelion to believe that we’re raising our children wrong. I’ve seen too many people humbled by. their own sweat to believe we’ve stopped trying. We’re not perfect, we can be small-minded, cruel, and selfish, but we are decent. Go outside, start running, and fall down. Somebody will help you up. It happens to me all the time.

I’m not sure if what I saw one year ago was ever a void. It was more of a vessel, I just didn’t know what it contained. I didn’t know that I was needed out there just as I was in my own home, in the small peaceful ways that humans need each other, for affirmation, solidarity, and love. It’s easy to forget, but then somebody stumbles, instinctively you reach out, and you remember.

Thank you all for reading these stories, for sharing them, and diligently prodding me along. I haven’t been doing any of this alone.