but these things are hard to put my finger on, hard to fix.
and so, hard to feel.
but when i do feel it, it's a specific and peculiar sort of Sad.
so then it's the battle of letting myself feel (somewhat irrationally, which annoys my logic) or becoming numb.
usually vacillating between the two.
enough of that vulnerability for now.
//
today is september 11.
i got up at 5:20 to go running with a friend.
who knew that hour still even existed?!
anyway. it does.
that, with its accompanying happy little circumstances, started my day off well.
slowly, my body started to rebel and my latent knee injury awoke and reared it's angry, groggy head. and then my head felt like it was a good day to get a migraine, probably because it's most wonderfully inconvenient when i have a pretty intense deadline (which i miraculously hit today).
this isn't supposed to be a log of my daily events.
point is, i ended up more subdued than i was this morning.
still in a good mood, just physically not feeling great.
now i'm just sitting here (i cancelled my plans tonight due to said migraine),
and i decided i'd like a new cover photo for facebook.
i started looking through my italy pictures...
then through my mexico pictures.
with a spotify playlist on shuffle,
music gently filled my head as i perused.
it had been a while since i've looked through either of these sets of photos.
and slowly, i started to feel the Sad creep in.
it's not necessarily a depressed sort of sad.
it's just a sad sort of Sad.
it could definitely lead to the depressed sort of ad, but innately, it's just its own Sad.
a more flavorful sort of melancholy maybe?
a respectful slow ache aching for the past.
i saw the hashtag trending today, #neverforget.
i think that's really powerful.
september 11 was and is incredibly important to me.
but i also realized that sometimes we only intentionally take time to remember the more obvious events in history, and we usually wait for holidays to remind us.
looking through these photos, it just hit me that it's necessary, sometimes vital--to reflect and remember the really September Elevens of our personal lives. and also to remember our own Independence Days. our deepest heartbreaks and our greatest victories, because they're part of the same experience.
it's easier to remember the good things, but sometimes we don't intentionally reflect on them. i think maybe i should, more. and then also the times that have been really hard. and by hard, i mean Hard. it's really important to understand where our growth has come from, and also where our calluses and scars lay, so we're at least aware of them and can start to help them heal if they/we need to.
last night i went to a meditation class and our teacher just had us sit there for 30 minutes, just breathing in silence, observing our thoughts at a distance. we really had to just sit and face ourselves. it was...hard.
as we remember our personal gethsemenes and our greatest victories, we more fully realize who we are and where we came from. and hopefully that can steer us into where we're going. the past is a part of us and always will be, though it doesn't have to define the future.
i'm not trying to say live in the past, but out of respect for what these experiences have done for us and how they've shaped us -- those lessons we must #neverforget.
