seasons Archives - Julianne Harvey

In Culture, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Speaking, Uncategorized

Endings and Beginnings

Julianne HarveyMay 27, 2021May 27, 2021

We are in a time of transition, with seasons ending and new ones beginning. This pandemic, which has dragged on forever and a year, is entering a fresh stage with our province announcing a re-opening plan. All four of us in my immediate family have been vaccinated with our first dose, providing hope for a return to normalcy.

But what the hell does that even mean? Almost fifteen months into this thing, we have adjusted to masks, social distancing, staying at home, being extra cautious all the damn time. This weird version of life now feels normal to us. I can’t quite imagine getting on a plane again, going on vacation and out to restaurants, socializing with others, and speaking to a crowd of real live human beings instead of through a screen.

I’m reminded again of how strange and unsettling change can be. I know it’s good for me, like eating my vegetables and flossing my teeth, but I really hate not knowing what to expect. For this whole pandemic none of us were able to make any real plans, because staring into the future was like peering at a giant question mark. But now it appears hope is on the horizon, and yet I find myself still feeling cautious and uncertain.

Every ending has an invitation to a beginning built into it. I’m trying to focus on that as we move into the summer. Ava graduated this week from grade twelve and we’re preparing for her to attend the University of Victoria in September. She’s enrolled in the theatre program where she’ll work toward a BFA in acting. Another rough ending, when she moves out of our house, with an exciting beginning just after the tears have dried.

Perhaps the key is to make room for all of it. The sadness when one thing ends, then the vacuum of the liminal space where we feel unprepared and afraid, and finally the rejuvenation of a new experience. As Anne Lamott wrote, “My diocesan priest friend Terry Richie says the thing is not to try harder, but to resist less.” I’m inherently bad at resisting less, but it’s something I’m working toward. Flowing with the current instead of against it.

Each of us is at different stages of change, but when it comes to the pandemic we are all experiencing some of the same growing pains. We’re like butterflies emerging from the chrysalis, flying into the sunshine, freer to move around than we’ve been in over a year. Who knows what will happen next? Maybe that’s part of the allure. To allow ourselves grace when we feel timid, and to celebrate together when we feel brave. When one season ends, another one automatically begins. It’s hopeful and scary at exactly the same time.

In Culture, Minimalism, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Content

Julianne HarveyFebruary 14, 2018

It’s no small thing to be content. To stop pursuing happiness in order to recognize, just for a moment, that you are already happy.

Everyone’s life is made up of seasons. Some are sweet, and others are agony. One month can feel like a year, slogging through shoulder-high mud, and the next can fly by in a blur of ordinary days. And yet some seasons are special in undefined ways, where we are lucky enough to see that it’s all going to plan and we laugh quite a bit and our days and nights are mostly smooth sailing.

I feel like we’re in one of those sweet seasons right now. We are out of the demanding little-kid stage and the teenaged years have not brought the promised wreckage others predicted in doomsday tones. We enjoy spending time with our kids and I love seeing the daily fruit of our number one parenting motto: Don’t Be An Asshole.

To me, contentment means not longing for something other than what you have. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, with practices like daily meditation to help me stay anchored in the present moment along with careful boundaries in my relationships making a big difference to my calm state of being.

Some of this is just a decision. My pursuit of happiness was never-ending and exhausting, so I decided to simply be happy instead. To want less instead of having more. To go simpler when the rest of the world is complex. To create beauty inside of myself and cultivate it so that it blooms. To need less from other people and ask for more from myself.

It’s really damn good. We are capable of so much more than we think. When we push past fear, a whole new existence is on the other side. For a lifelong people-pleaser, to truly not care what others think of me or my parenting or my friendship choices or my work or my weight or my fashion is unbelievably liberating. It’s a kind of freedom I couldn’t have conceived of a decade ago. And now I’m living it and not interested in asking for anyone’s permission or approval.

When we can live as ourselves in a world that works hard to get us to be something inauthentic, we have traveled a great distance toward contentment. Anything that takes you further from your intuitive self and invites negative energy into your safe space can be abandoned. I’m learning not to put myself in so many uncomfortable situations. Life is precious and important and sacred. I make my decisions with that in mind now.

Trying to make other people happy is a dead-end road. It’s not a good goal. Figure out what you need, first and foremost, and design your life around that. The people you love most will benefit indirectly from your contentment and healthy choices. Simplify wherever possible. Your time and energy is valuable. Don’t spend it on people who give nothing back to you but stress and frustration. You simply do not have to live that way. All you need is the word “no” and you’ll be free.

Contentment is a worthy goal. Invest in whatever gets you closer. If you are moving further away, look at your decisions and see where you went wrong. And it’s okay if not everyone is happy with you, as long as you are happy yourself.

In Nurture, Personal Growth, Speaking, Writing

Lost

Julianne HarveyNovember 1, 2017

I’m feeling lost. After a surge of excitement and scheduling after a big writers’ conference, I’m now floundering with so many possible projects to pursue and no clear direction on what should be the top priority.

Do you ever feel that way? Rudderless, slightly adrift, believing that it will all make sense eventually but for now you simply exist in a fog of too much of everything.

The cure, in the past, has been to embrace my frail humanity. To acknowledge that I am not a machine. Perhaps the worst part of being lost is the shame associated with our humanity. I want to feel like a world-beater, not a sad, confused person making my way through the dark on my own.

Life is made up of seasons. Some are bright, clear, happy. Others are murky, painful, baffling. Extending grace for the hard times certainly helps. I don’t have trouble offering love and nurture to those around me who are suffering, but when it’s me, the rules seem to change.

Eventually, the light will shine again and I’ll have a better sense of where I’m heading. I suppose I simply have to wait for that, and do the best I can in the meantime. Gentleness is the key here. Inching forward toward your goals, little by little, is better than no movement at all. After so many years of struggling with patience, you’d think it would begin to come easier. And yet it remains elusive.

I stayed after my creative writing class to chat with my professor about the number of projects I’m working on. She encouraged me to narrow my goals to four things and write them on an index card. I had a terribly hard time getting the list to four. I initially cheated and wrote eight by using slashes, essentially creating two categories out of one line.

After looking at this card for a few days, I realized there was too much on it. I worked at it again, creating four clear categories in my work life. Suddenly it was a little bit clearer, but I still feel overwhelmed.

What helps you when you feel lost? Do you wait it out? I’d love to hear any of your strategies.

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Writing

Liminal Space

Julianne HarveyAugust 30, 2016August 29, 2016Leave a comment

Do you ever have trouble finding the words for the big conversations? You know, the ones where you long to communicate some deep truth, pulled from the centre of your being with a huge effort, where it feels like you are standing completely naked in front of the other person?

I’m struggling with this. I feel so utterly changed by the last four weeks of my life, but yet unable to properly talk about it with those I love most. I’ve turtled up inside, processing and going dark to the outside world.

This is likely a necessary step, and healthy, but it’s also a tiny bit isolating. It creates a gap between you and the people in your life. I know I have the right to say I’m not ready to talk about things, and this might be the best solution until I feel more sure of what it is I want to say, but the big conversations in life always leave me slightly terrified.

So much of our existence is regular routine. Only when it’s disrupted do we see things in a new way. And we realize that we are also irrevocably altered.

I learned this phrase from Rob Bell’s recent podcast on Seasons (and if you aren’t listening to all of Rob Bell’s podcasts, please rectify this immediately as they will immensely improve your quality of life): liminal space. It means the middle space; when one stage is completed and the next has yet to begin.

I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear the phrase “liminal space”. I love it and plan to overuse it from this point forward. It explains so much of that waiting bit at the centre of big change. It’s transition, uncertainty, fear, loss, excitement. You know you don’t want to go back but you can’t quite move forward as the next chapter hasn’t revealed itself.

Perhaps it’s not a good idea to commit to much in the liminal space. It’s for waiting and growing and shifting. It requires an openness to what will now be different. We can’t forecast what the next season will look like while we are still moving through the loss of what came before. We simply have to wait.

Have I mentioned that I hate waiting? This appendectomy and its long, slow crawl back to my previous healthy state has invited me every single day to be patient. To stop accomplishing and just sit in my new and tired state in my comfy shorts that don’t hurt my stitches. The whole world seems different as a result. It may still be whizzing by, along with everyone around me, but I am in a separate place and I can’t keep up. Nor do I really want to.

I do feel marked in some invisible way. I can see it, but no one else really can. I guess the prescription is more waiting. I must allow this growth to bud in its own time. There is no point to rushing it or shouting something from the rooftops that I barely understand for myself. Some things should be private, particularly in the liminal space.

If you are in a transition point right now, let’s wait it out together. We can reassure each other that we won’t be in this middle space forever. The new season will begin to take shape. We will survive the transition. We have the ability to let go of the last place where we were either happy or sad (or more likely a mix of both). It will simply take a little bit of time. Sit with me in the garden and we’ll encourage each other through this liminal space.

In Identity, Minimalism, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth

Redefining Bravery

Julianne HarveyJune 21, 2016June 20, 2016Leave a comment

Last week, a friend redefined bravery to me. I was searching for the escape hatch, the red nuclear “launch” button, the excuse to reboot and start over instead of facing up to a difficult and messy situation.

She said, “Showing up when it’s hard is brave, too.” I really, really needed to hear this. When it gets dark all around us and we can no longer find our way, it’s human nature to want to flee. And sometimes, of course, this is the right course of action. But many times, the courageous act is to stay strong when the storm is blowing. To refuse to run, even though it would relieve the pressure and make things easier for a while. But there are also great lessons to be learned from staying put.

I’m so grateful to this friend, for she had the guts to give me her honest thoughts. She did not say what I hoped she would, in my moment of desperation with my bold plan to sell everything we own and go on a madcap family adventure. Instead, she listened and offered another perspective, one born from her own painful experiences with loss and growth.

Bravery takes many forms. When life is unforgivingly tough, as it often is, our courage can desert us when we need it most. This is why the community of loved ones we have invested in and built up is so critical. When we lose all perspective and a good deal of our common sense and optimism, we need people who know us and love us to talk us out of the darkness and back to the light.

Stability is no small thing. It matters, to us and to those who count on us. When we feel lost and bereft, it’s tempting to go for the rash and daring option; to shake up the status quo and let the damn chips fall where they may. In certain seasons and stages, this can be entirely appropriate and helpful to jump-start a necessary change, but at other times it’s the coward’s way.

Everything shifted for me during the course of our conversation. It was like putting on glasses so the fuzzy edges came into focus. The fever dream had passed and I could stop thinking about surviving each day and move my vision out by a year or two. Jason and I needed a fresh heart-to-heart, so we could redefine the future we committed to when we joined our lives together nearly eighteen years ago.

It all looks different again, even though nothing outwardly has changed. Life is still hard. I continue to long for something new and hopeful. Every one of us needs extra breathing space in our soul from time to time. We are birds who must summon the courage to stretch our wings and take flight. We all need each other, for support, encouragement and care.