“In any moment, no matter how lost we feel, we can take refuge in presence and love. We need only pause, breathe, and open to the experience of aliveness within us. In that wakeful openness, we come home to the peace and freedom of our natural awareness.”  – Tara Brach

Ever feel like you can’t quite catch up, catch a break or even catch your breath? That has been a space I’ve been occupying lately in fact, I’ve set up camp here. I’ve decorated the walls with mental sketches of what it takes for me to feel productive, good, or simply enough. Lately I’ve had lots of both exciting and difficult to navigate happenings and I’ve found myself with too much to do, too much to take in, just too much. It’s a familiar, and in this way a “comfortable,” place. Yet I know it’s a place where I miss things, I miss whole conversations with family and friends (or my response is so delayed it brings a laugh or worse an eye roll from my teenage daughter), I miss taking in the beauty of my surroundings, I miss experiencing what I’m up to fully, and most importantly I start to miss my life.

As I watched an interview I did with my fellow Northwestern University alum, Dr. Jay Kumar for an episode of the GenConnectU’s series Thriving Brain called Why Are Presence and Awareness Essential for Effective Leadership? I realized that what I’ve really been missing lately is presence. ​

"Breathe it all in, love it all out." Mary Oliver

I last blogged on 2/24/20 – that was only 40 days ago (interesting number of days!) and in that time the world has changed before my eyes; I’ve been trying to catch my breath and find my way forward and I’m thinking you might be too. As my 16-year-old son said yesterday – “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life” so true, this is a first, even in my much longer life.

For the second half of the last 40 days I’ve been “busy” – but not busy in the way I have always thought of the word. Typically, my busy is focused on the doing – meeting with clients and colleagues, gathering with friends and family, carpooling, emailing, doing or “reminding” my family members to do household chores, running from thing to thing, fitting in one more task from the list – don’t get me wrong I’ve still been doing many of these things albeit in new ways and at the same time I’ve been busy trying to make sense of what is happening. I’ve been subsumed into the chaos of my thoughts – so much to process and so much time to process and yet clarity continues to escape me. 

"Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them." Albert Einstein