Still and always practicing. Sometimes I get it “right”. Sometimes I fail myself (or someone else). Sometimes I am proud of the woman I am right now. Sometimes I fall short of being the woman I most want to be. I need more practice. 🙂

I’m sipping a delicious hot coffee, a freebie from the local chain vendor of caffeinated beverages (one of many that accumulated over the past not-quite-a-year of weekly commutes to the city). Handy. Yes, I saved them up over time without using them, figuring there might be some time when it would be nice to enjoy one, but perhaps excessively costly, for… reasons. Here I am, with reasons. LOL It’s a pleasant quiet morning. The slow dawn revealed a cloudy start to the day. The day started easily, and I had slept well through the night, waking feeling quite rested. My Traveling Partner pinged me a kiss emoji over SMS on my way to the solitude of a morning walk, and some time in the co-work space handling job search tasks. A good beginning to a new day, indeed. 😀

My Traveling Partner and I had a moment of conflict “recently” (I have the sense that it was this week, but… I honestly don’t recall when, at this point, and it entirely blew over, and was, it seemed, more a byproduct of stress over lingering sleep challenges than anything else), and in the midst of taking turns saying things to each other that were needlessly unkind, he mocked the very thing(s) that I rely on to persist in putting one foot in front of the other day-after-day and which I use to heal ancient pain, and grow as a person, and yeah, also even use to treat him well, and with kindness and compassion. Ouch. My feelings were incredibly hurt. I was astonished and appalled. I was… enraged. I was saddened. (I mean, for real though? Damn, dude. Way to be hurtful.)

Here’s the thing, though… On reflection, I am sensitive to the idea – the very true truth – that “hurt people hurt people”. I know this first hand, from within the context of my own experience. Meaning to say that people who have been emotionally wounded over time do lash out, and they do inflict new/further damage on people around them, often those they love, and that damage is often targeted, using uniquely personal information that has the greatest potential to inflict pain, taken from the most intimate shared moments. Messy and unpleasant. Also… not actually “personal”. It just feels that way. It is an expression of the pain of the person delivering the injury, more than anything explicitly to do with the person they are lashing out at in that moment. Hurt and anger are strange like that. It feels personal to the recipient, mostly because as creatures we’re prone to taking shit personally, not so much because it really is.

…I get it, though… I work through a lot of my personal bullshit and baggage right here. Out in the open. Honest and real and raw and… also aspirational. I seek to do better. I don’t always hit the mark. I set goals for myself. I don’t always achieve them. I acknowledge where I’ve failed or fallen short. I pick myself up and walk on. I am practicing. Day after day, I show up, and I practice the practices that I hope will, over time, result in my becoming the woman (the person) I most want to be. I’m not there yet. I’ll point out two things that seem obvious to me, but maybe aren’t so obvious… 1. I practice because I’m human, and I’m “not there yet”; I need the practice! 2. “The woman I most want to be”… may not be the woman anyone else wants to see me become. With just those two things in mind, there’s more than enough within these blog posts to fill any argument with insults and barbed remarks to fuel any heated moment. Taking them personally would only set me up for disappointment, a feeling of chronic inadequacy, a sense of utter failure, and a quick slide into despair… defeating the point of being here, now, in the first place. “Don’t drink the poison.“

Instead of attacking him for attacking me over such personal things, or for seeking to undermine my progress (it’s highly unlikely he was looking at his words through that lens at all), I let those words simply land in the space between us unaddressed beyond the basic point that he was feeling hurt, mistreated, and provoked, and was frustrated by his lack of sleep. I did my best to focus on the need actually being expressed, and not so much on the shitty way he was expressing it in the moment. He’s very human. I “filed it away” for later reflection, and here I find myself, reflecting. It’s a nice morning for it. I’m in a good place. We’re in a good place with each other. I know I need more practice. That’s not new information. What’s useful to reflect on is where we are with each other, and how I can make use of what I’ve heard my partner say to me to become a better partner, and friend, myself.

I think about the lawn my Traveling Partner recently put in. It’s gorgeous. In the process of preparing the ground for the new sod, my partner inadvertently damaged one of the roses. He didn’t hide that, or ignore it, or try to excuse the error, or blame someone/something else; he simply pointed it out, with some regret. He also took that moment to transform the mistake into something beautiful; he carefully cut the roses and put the blossoms in a wee vase on the table where I would see them. So cute. The little vase of flowers meant so much more to me than the unplanned cutting of a stray cane or two on a rose that is already pretty well-established. Just saying; we’re human. We make mistakes. We fuck shit up. It’s how we handle that and the outcome, and how we support and seek to heal each other as human beings that matters most. 🙂

I sip my coffee. It’s a good morning.

So… yeah. I’m a work in progress for sure. lol The journey is the destination. I am my own cartographer, and this trip has no map. I do my best, and I can fearlessly state that my results vary, and sometimes my best definitely does not feel “good enough”. It’s necessary to begin again. Often. All of that is more than “okay” – it’s the nature of the experience. Growth and incremental change over time are not instant. There are verbs involved.

I breathe. Exhale. Relax. It’s a beautiful morning to practice practices, and to put in the effort to become the woman I most want to be. With that in mind, it’s time to begin again. 😀