I try to write every morning before opening up work things. I fail, but I try. I just write to get the words out, but for reasons I ended up reading this morning’s words to Kim.
“Are you going to publish that?” she asked.
“No.”
And, so, here we are…
There is a fake candle fake flickering in the room, and it still brings warmth and coziness into the darkness and into my spirit. Peter loves the thing. It is his own personal pretend fire that he can carry around the room without being fussed at. It is his own personal magic trick, because not only can he blow it out by flipping the switch off, but he can blow the candle on. And every single time it makes him laugh louder and louder. I have seen the trick at least two dozen times and I still laugh every single time. These little things are what make the stay-safe-stay-at-home pandemic survivable.
What else, what else, what else… Oh, I turned https://hi.thomasknoll.info back on. Not sure why yet. It is either going to be boring or fun or stupid and who knows which? If nothing else, I will play with it for now and I can always quit later. That’s the fun part of this shit. Who really cares right? Nothing matters. We’re all going to die. So be kind and have fun, and whatever amount of love we can manage to give away to everyone else then becomes our legacy. How much love can we pump into the system before we expire? I think that might be the challenge.
So on to the main question: what would I like today’s highlight to be?
Simplicity. Joy. Hope. A moment of unguarded joy. Truly be me. Why not be unique? Who cares what everyone thinks and everyone wants? Why not just be one hundred thousand million twenty hundred twenty percent what I think and feel? Isn’t that what we all want? Or does the desire to belong and to be loved to drive us to only want to slip by unnoticed? To conform? To stay under the fray? Why not always tell the truth? Why not live each moment like it is one of our last? I would like today’s highlight to be a tiny yet momentous flicker of the moment I started living for the moment. Not the future. Not other people’s expectations. The moment that I dipped my toes in the water of becoming myself – and the moment passes – because it too was just a little insignificant unscary unchanging acceptance. This actually is how it could be. The taboos and blockers and restrictions and rejections were only ever in my head. I invented them in an attempt to keep myself safe, presuming that I even needed to be kept safe from others. The out there. What they might do to me. But, in reality, I was only trying to keep myself safe from me. Who was going to judge me the harshest for my decisions and my actions and my tone and my thoughts? It was me. I was going to be hardest on myself.
That will be my highlight of the day.
And there will be an unbelievable number of opportunities to experience my highlight today. When Peter wakes up any second and comes storming out of his room to tumble into the couch and into my day. When Kim wakes and stretches and saunders out to find coffee and to shake loose the sleepless night. When she explores the safety and security of her own ability to be herself wondering how I might respond… and how much of her own self she will keep inside and not share with me because she — like all of us — remembers what it feels like to get burned and knows instead to keep her distance from the dangerous fire. How can I create space for those two to bloom and explore and extend and become? Then, in the majority of my day where I spend almost half of my day working with people at Revelry, there will be hundreds of these moments — in slack, in text, on video calls in Zoom, in GitHub messages, and in emails — all of these moments where I can play a role, hide in monotony, shrink away from opportunities or simply choose to exist in those spaces slightly more myself. Be a little more honest. Stretch just a little bit and put my true self into the moment. Yes, there is a risk of breaking things or destroying things or upsetting things. People might not like the way it feels. It might stretch them in ways they weren’t even hoping to stretch. It may backfire. But what the hell else are we going to do? Just let another day pass where nothing happens, and misery persists?
Nah. Let’s have fun.