Today is Easter Sunday. (It’s always been my least favorite holiday. The candy, the pastel, the creepy bunny pictures.) It’s also the week of Passover. I’m not Jewish and don’t actually celebrate the holiday in my family, but I do look forward to hearing my friends’ and co-workers’ plans on how their families celebrate. If we’re being honest, it’s mostly the food that I like to hear about. But it’s also the many traditions and the symbolism of those traditions that I find really beautiful.
The news for the last few weeks has been so depressing, so scary, and I’m finding it hard to not panic every time I think about taking our family on a plane, or a hike the next time we visit Seattle or go overseas. Mysterious plane disappearances, gruesome mudslides, hostile international warfare, genocide, trafficking…. And let’s not forget the anniversaries of other catastrophes just from this last week…the Oklahoma City bombing, the Boston Marathon, various school shootings, annnnnd I’m in full blown We-Are-Never-Leaving-This-House-Again mode.
And then I have to go to work the next morning. So I bury the fear and the worry until the next BREAKING pings on my phone.
I am trying to be more thankful, kind, gentle in my daily life. I mentioned a few weeks back about this worry I have with Lincoln. I don’t want to pass on some of my bad habits…my tendencies to jump right to the negative or being angry. It’s been working pretty well, but in the last week…with all the best wishes to my colleagues for a Happy Passover for their family, I am finding that a desire to simply “be more thankful” isn’t quite enough. It doesn’t help with the worry that any of my loved ones will somehow not get screwed out of a long, healthy life.
So I need to be more proactive in ensuring we do…at least in the present. I will continue to remember the past, because seriously, who can forget mysterious planes and gruesome mudslides (especially when they’re on the news every waking hour). I will mentally cross my fingers and toes (and Lincoln’s fingers and toes and my dogs’ paws and paws) and hope that nothing like this ever comes anywhere close to a possibility in my life. And then I will put my phone down and eat dinner with family, walk around the park, continue to smuggle money from our checking account into the college fund, etc.
I will be thankful for those things I have right now. And be present.
This picture is from yesterday. Lincoln and I completed our 2nd AIDS Walk of Central Ohio. I walked the 5k; Lincoln clapped to cheer on the runners at the beginning, waved to his subjects from his baby-Pope-mobile during the main event, and then napped for the final stretch. He did good. I forgot to wear sunblock (and I regret that now) but, all in all, it was a really beautiful day and we enjoyed our mini-adventure.
Keeping My Marbles 