saved your life

we have this thing in our house. I think I started it. Like when a child does something life threateningly stupid and I stop them, I tell the child "I just saved your life." I never say it without truly believing it happened. In the least I saved our family a hospital trip. I noticed the phrase now because E uses it all the time in his over-dramatic, almost-five-years-old way. it's cute. sometimes he is accurate.
when he catches his brother and keeps him from falling off the bed during the craziness that is jumping on the bed.

"I just saved your life L!"

yes. yes you actually did.

other times he is like "I almost fell of my bike, but I stopped myself. I saved my life"

maybe you did. you definitely have good instincts, no matter what.

I guess I am remarking on this because I feel like that is the point of being a mom: keep the children alive long enough to teach them how to keep themselves alive.

basic human instinct. and if we didn't feel this way then, you know what, we humans would not have survived long enough to have this conversation. for real.

The survival instinct can really drive a lifestyle. Fear of not surviving gives a push that mimics the push a person gets from doing something they love and are incredibly passionate about. fear can flog you raw. passion and love do not do that.

100 year rainfall

In school I learned about designing storm water drainage systems. We practiced designing them for 100 yr rainfalls. Humans only have data for so long when it comes to volumes of rain falling on places that people live. In developed areas where paving keeps rain from soaking into the ground, you have to have storm water management- essentially places for water from the sky to go so that it does not sweep people or buildings away. The maximum capacity volume of water that a system should be able to handle is the highest volume of rainfall in the last 100 years for that area. So what happens when rainfall breaks a 100 year record? flooding. With climate change, higher volume rainfalls break these records. The storm water system can only hold so much, it will overflow and floods will happen. This is just inherent in the design. There is nothing that can be done. You just have to clean up any damage, then change the highest rainfall in the last 100 years, and add the required capacity to the storm water system to meet it. You gotta clean up and then build, it takes energy and time. Just the way it is. The new normal requires a higher capacity.

When things come that are worse than you could ever imagine, you have to get to a place where you are thankful for them. A place where you can build on top of them. The things that change your life have to be accepted as part of your reality. The only way I know how to get there is through therapy. Emotionally focused therapy. Opening up to other people. Not trying to teach all the time, but trying to learn as well. Even when you think you know more. Open your ears and hear a new perspective just because it is there to be heard. You might find it is as valuable as your own, or you might reject it. Are you more open to information about humans from people that don't know anything about your life, or can you take information from people that do know something? Do you have it in you?

Vulnerability. The end and the beginning.
Apparently, energy and abilities are endless if you trust in the Lord. And I do believe that even though evidence from my own life could suggest otherwise, at least on a physical level. For me, I know, I can increase my capacity because I have done it before. I can turn and face an entirely different direction, I have done it before. I know how rough it is, how much work. But there is no reason to delay change. Even if I am stretched so thin that another change might break me. It won't break me all the way through, and if it does then I will be healed. Let it come. Let it all come at the same time. If a part of my foundation is washed away, then I can rebuild it better and more beautiful than it ever was before. Opportunity to be even better. to live more fully. to not care about what faceless people think of me. Freedom to be exactly what God made me. My whole foundation has already been washed out from under me once. maybe more. This is life. It doesn't stop. I don't want it to stop, that is why I am working so hard.

coming

Ive been doing a lot of reading and watching and absorbing for the last five years. in two languages. alongside people of many different cultures. Culture is a gigantic and basically invisible barrier to achieving enough understanding between humans that we get to have real world peace. Gigantic and very translucent- I don't have the words yet to explain it, but they will come. and there will be a lot of them.

Anyway. I have been a sponge for five years and I am about to ring myself out. And it needs to be OUT not just expressed. Rung out onto the floor and left for people to accidentally step in, then maybe their socks get so wet that they have to remove them and walk around the house bare foot for the rest of their lives.

I want to make use of this "ring-out" in the best possible way. I don't want to waste a drop, so I have to slow it down. The actual expression has to come out at a reasonable pace. I am only one of me. The family is still number 1. The ideas have built over five years; grown from roots that need to be explained and explored. The expression is important, and needs to be efficient, but it also needs to have all its corners.

So it comes. It comes soon. I don't want to link my personal identity to any of it. I don't trust "the internet" with my personal identity. I want the ideas to stand on their own. A huge challenge is anonymizing the context enough so that it is still genuine but also hard to place.
I live in a bubble. You can be famous in one part of the world and live as not in every other- that kind of bubble. I don't know anything about either place I am attached to without putting the effort in to find out. I am an outlier. I have spent my whole life telling myself that my experiences are not unique or special, don't get it twisted. But now, that is an undeniable fact in some aspects of my existence.

The combination of my experiences has shown me something that is not the same as other people. From that demonstration, I have made choices that are different and through that I learn things other people don't know. And of course, one can find another person in the world that has made the exact same choice- or knows the exact same thing. even in the exact same moment. But the choices before and the ones that come, the lessons learned from choices- eventually it leads in different directions. Chains of choices. One of the many ways Jesus saves is through being a love activated highlighter of the "choice chains" that are harmonious with mine.


And that is all for the first day in years that I have had pre-scheduled, truly legitimate alone time.
EAT IT.
no, but seriously, thanks for reading.