A World of Extremes
A week ago today this little being moved through me into the world.
A week ago today the fires of CA started raging above and below us.
A week ago tonight 12 people were murdered in my hometown of Thousand Oaks.
We’re living in an age of extremes. Extreme beauty. Extreme weather. Extreme politics. Extreme violence. Extreme resistance. Extreme love.
And I too am finding myself toggling between the polarities. Delight and anxiety. Heart cracking love and paralyzing fear. Creation and destruction. Hope and despair. Life and death.
Polarities are seductive. They give us something to fight for or against. They also, over time, numb us or ravage us if we stay too long at one end or the other.
So the question arises, is there life in the middle? And if so, what the hell does that look like?
And yet because life is constantly changing, constantly in flux, throwing you from one end of the spectrum to the other, there is no living permanently in the soft middle. The middle is only a place we visit, an inner sanctum we’re continually called to come back to, to find our ground, our solace, our resilience and our relief.
For me, the middle is allowing for what’s hard while also taking action to feel better.
The middle looks like embracing my fear and then checking on our fire insurance and donating to a fire relief fund.
The middle looks like sticking my nose in my newborn’s mouth because it smells like a bakery in there and then text banking for a cause I care about.
The middle looks like making room for my anxiety and then listing what I’m grateful for and calling a dear friend to share BOTH.
There is no escaping the things that devastate and scare us. There is no weaseling our way out of pain, loss and death. And yet with every death, there is birth. With every destruction, room is made for creation.
It is our compassion for self and others and our caring action that brings us back from the extremes to the recalibration of the middle, making us feel just a little bit better, a bit more grounded, readying us for the next inevitable wave.
If you enjoyed this post, please keep reading!
This conversation is between myself and an incredible woman named Ani, who shares how she learned how to be authentic, practice self-compassion, and take up space without guilt or shame through my 6-month group coaching program, Homecoming. Ani is a model for how to excavate internalized misogyny and live authentically without fear of others’ opinions. The conversation originally took place on my podcast, The Path Home.