Happy New Year! (Again)
Spring has sprung and it's just like starting over
Listen to the article (read by me and not some clanker)
Spring! Nature’s Real New Year
Spring arrived in Central Texas several weeks ago in all her glory. The wild flowers are in bloom. The crepe myrtles are bursting with their pink flowers and with the copious rain of the last week everything around my home is lush and green. I even discovered a few baby tomatoes and blackberries hiding within my monstrously overgrown garden.
Most days I feel the constant push of our capitalist culture that demands that I do more. Be faster, more efficient, max…something. Just like the myth of endlessly growing profit, I get trapped into thinking I am an endlessly productive machine. Churning out work, perfectly efficient, operating at 100% capacity 100% of the time.
But, that is of course, not true.
Just as with the seasons there are times of growth and times of rest. This Spring has been marked by the call to care and community work. Between ailing elderly relatives, the struggles of adolescence, my son’s school community going through massive upheaval, and my own struggles with illness and injury I was once again reminded that I can not be all things all the time to all people.
So I took a step back, reduced my work down to the bare essentials, and began to focus back on my creativity. This is a massive privilege I don’t take lightly. But what I know is that humans were not meant to sit in front of a glowing screen 10+ hours a day. We were meant to be in nature. We are meant to make real physical things with our hands, brains, and bodies. We’re meant to be in community with each other. And We are meant to live at a pace more aligned with nature and the seasons than with the stock market and algorithm.
Like so many, I set these ambitious resolutions in January—mostly centered around work, money, and the typical trappings of success. But Springtime offers us a real new year. While everything around me is bursting with life, growth, and the potential of abundance, I’m focused on existing in harmony with my surroundings and community and trusting that the creativity and connection will lead to an abundance of ideas and projects.
The practice of noticing
The biggest way I’m attuning my nervous system with the environment around me is by cultivating my skill of noticing—or rather selectively focusing on different things around me.
Every second of every moment our bodies are getting sensory input—the air temperature, the feel of your shirt on your back, the color of the table you sit at, the hum of the refrigerator, that spicy prick of a piece of black pepper left over in your teeth from lunch. Most of the time most of us do a pretty good job of filtering out some or all of these distracting sensory inputs. In the cases of autism, sensory processing disorder, and other types of neurodivergence, this filtering or blocking can be much more difficult.
Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been going on walks in my neighborhood with the intention of noticing something new every time. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 13 years, so noticing something new is a bit of a challenge.
I go with my phone, but without music or audio books. I walk the same 3 block loop every time. I look around me. I breathe with the intent to really smell things (it’s a challenge on trash days), and I really work to pay attention to the things around me. And in just a couple weeks I’ve experienced really interesting and surprising things.
A truck that has been parked for a while that has a bunch of sticks piled in the back is now home to 3 finches that appear to have nested there.
There’s a lot of trash about, just kind of loose – especially on Wednesdays, the day after trash collection.
A neighbor cut a hole in their fence and put mesh over it and it acts like a little window for their golden retriever to watch me and other travelers pass by
The chinaberry tree two blocks down is dropping berries and as they are ground into the pavement, the flies seem to be very excited about this – it reminds me of the “ginkstink” when I lived in Washington, DC.
Noticing these things and watching the changes in these 3 square blocks helps me feel connected to my environment. It feels simultaneously bigger than myself and more comprehensible than pretty much anything the algorithm feeds me on Instagram.
Stopping for Wonder
Earlier today I was on a call with a professional contact. This was our first time actually talking one on one, we’d been connected by a mutual acquaintance.
Right in the middle of what she was saying her voice cut off and it was silent for several seconds. I thought maybe the call had dropped, but no, she was completely captivated by a bird in her back yard.
She was working from home, sitting on her back porch. A small red bird came to her bird feeder during a break in the rain. She had never seen this type of bird before and was completely captivated. Experiencing absolute wonder and awe.
When she rejoined me she said “A little red bird just landed next to me on my bird feeder, and I’m sorry, you just weren’t as important as the bird at the moment.”
She was right. It was a magical moment of wonder and awe for her and she needed to sit and witness for a moment, rather than continue our conversation.
If you’ve been feeling too rushed and pulled in a million directions. Feeling the pressures of constant efficiency and improvement. Overwhelmed with the torrent of information–terrible and mundane–that you can’t control. Consider stepping away, even for 10 minutes, move your body, breathe deep, and notice something new about the world around you.
Consider this your invitation to return to being a person, not a machine.