Walking to the Library

The fullness of being me

It’s a 45 degree day in Ohio in March and the world feels infinite.

I often tell people that my emotional range tends to be pretty middling. My highs are an 8/10 and lows 3/10. It makes me an excellent pairing to the enthusiastic. When I feel the edges of my experiences as I have this past week, when my highs are high and my lows are very low, I feel disoriented from myself. Where is the in-between ease?

It had been raining this week, beginning with a drive back from my parent’s home in Pennsylvania back to my house in Ohio. The drive reminded me of how badly I needed to replace my back windshield wiper. Yet I had a container of my mom’s shortbread in the car. Overall, a tolerable start to the week. 6/10.

I had a great call with my clergy coach, 8/10.

A beloved church member continued to have health difficulties, 4/10.

All to say, I was in range.

But something got knocked sideways and all the anxiety and accumulated stress of the world pulled the low end down. I had work commitments in unusual times. I also wonder if the resonance of this time of year—remembering the panic of three years ago in early March—was also creating internal distress.

When I am unwell I am distanced from myself.¹ I fell asleep one night this week feeling like I was floating above.

Yet today the sky was clear and open. I put on my old sneakers, the ones with the holes in the top where my toes peek through and walked out the side door.

You see, my life’s great love is reading. If my identity has one constant it is books. (Can this be true? I don’t think it’s hyperbole.) If you made me choose between libraries and churches I’m not sure I would hesitate. In my life now, I inhale ebooks on my phone and take a very particular joy in walking to the library less than a quarter mile up the street. It’s a perfect library, with a cheerful children’s section, community events advertised everywhere, and more books than I could ever read. Today I walked out with a free book from their cart of titles pulled out of circulation.

Walking home from the library on a sunny day having retrieved a new book to read, I was the most me I had been all week.

This isn’t the self-care anyone can prescribe. Take a day off! they say. Move your body, drink some water. There is no way to know, however, unless I explicitly state it, that all I need a moment in a library, with some sunshine, and a book of my own to hold. It doesn’t save the world and it might not even save me.

But with a glimpse of small purple flowers emerging from the ground, feeling my feet hit the sidewalk and book in hand, it feels like it just might.

Quote of the week

“But for me, philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time. So that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven’t had a true moment for yourself.” —John O’Donohue in an interview with Krista Tippett

What I’m reading

Always up for some characters in space, I enjoyed the mystery/thriller/time-travel romp that was Under Fortunate Stars by Ren Hutchings. I’m not sure anyone else would categorize it as mystery exactly, but the slow unfolding of clues certainly felt like the genre, even if there wasn’t a final solution in the typical way. Support queer authors and read this one the whole way to it’s final beautiful chapter.

What life looks like

Purple flowers.

1. https://manhattanmentalhealthcounseling.com/the-power-and-danger-of-disconnecting-from-ourselves/