The Book That Broke Me
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Hi Community,
On Mother’s Day, I had one wish: to sit outside and read a book. I’m a pretty avid reader and can tear through a book quickly. The book I picked up and finished this weekend, well, it broke me. Books can do that. Telling our own stories can do that too. So, here’s the story about how this book left me sobbing Sunday night at 11 pm.
TOOLS
The best way I could retain information in school was by annotating. My books were always marked with highlights, scribbles, and my own interpretation of what the passage was saying. To this day, I read with a highlighter (or the highlight function on my device).
Quotes, lyrics, and the various forms in which words present themselves have always been healing tools for me. Maybe it’s why I write each week. I find words so therapeutic. You feel seen when someone says something that strikes a deep feeling. There’s a powerful unraveling that I allow for myself when I read or hear something I can relate to.
We find when working with clients, music is especially a profound catalyst for release. Our clients (teens love this!) play us a song and sing it out loud and we can see the emotion resonating with them. They can laugh, cry, or just feel something within that makes it way outside of themselves. It’s a spoken language that doesn’t need to be spoken.
When we read a poem, quote, or book we can similarly have that experience. When I was a teen my best friend at the time gave me a coffee mug with 365 individual quotes in it. One for each day. These prompts gave me the opportunity to reflect each day and get curious about the emotion coming up.
And sometimes something speaks so loudly that it catches me off guard and before I can even process my thoughts or feelings, my body just lets go.
GRATITUDE
And here was that quote, which has been around for almost a thousand years but I had never heard before until it was put in the context of the story of Anxious People by Fredrik Backman.
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
– Martin Luther
You see, I’ve been so afraid. Despite my yoga practice, my meditation, my medication, my weekly therapy, my walks in nature, my friends, my gratitude journaling…I haven’t been able to get unstuck from my fear.
I’ve been grasping onto any certainty in an attempt to safeguard my loved ones. When I make a decision I keep doubting it. The world feels scary and heavy and overwhelming and the problems so big and the future unclear and I’ve been suffering under the weight of it all.
Despite knowing that being present is the best way through fear, I was having a hard time doing it. I kept getting reminders of threats and so I was attaching forcefully to anything to make me feel grounded – things, people, places, routines, rules, structure. Finding my center through movement, journaling and meditation came fleetingly. Until I read that quote. And then, I released.
INNOVATION
In reading that quote, I felt seen. I felt relief. It was finally the reminder I needed to hear.
Be present even when you’re terrified.
I’ve talked before about how fear divides. How fear makes us act irrationally and fight, flee and freeze. The more we’re scared, the more we are shut off from our rational selves. We’re cut off from solid decision-making and discernment.
And so I thought I had to rid myself of fear. I had to just override it through my mindfulness practices.
But this quote made me understand again (again, because I’ve learned this many times in life but I have to keep re-learning it with each new chapter) that I can befriend my fear. I can embrace the uncertainty because there’s no avoiding it. And I am never, ever in control.
So what can I do about that? Instead of resisting the fear, I accept it. I accept death and uncertainty and that the world is scary and may fall to pieces tomorrow. In accepting it, I stop running away from it and instead choose to live today.
Two more quotes from Anxious People landed for me in this context too.
“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, but that’s not what boats were built for”.
We’re meant to live, explore, be vibrant, and be courageous. We’re humans who are built for connection, learning, movement, and love. We must keep living, even if tomorrow is unclear. Even if 5 years from now the world may have ended. Today is all we have.
And our loved ones? The ones we are so terrified of something bad happening to them? Well, Fredrik Backman says lovingly, “You can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end”.
Even if I knew that my child would get sick or bullied or die too young…I’d still plant my apple tree. I wouldn’t re-do a thing. I wouldn’t stop living.
I read a different book, a not-great murder mystery, and last night had such a hard time with the storyline that I skipped to the end to get it over with. I was consumed with all the bad things that can happen, especially to young children. I was consumed by all the horrible people. I started panicking about all the things that could go wrong. Oh, hello fear.
And then I paused. I literally said “hello fear” and instead of being terrified, I let acceptance wash over me, and my response shifted into sadness. The world is sad. Life is hard. Bad things do happen. And that’s sad. There is so much sadness in the world. I let myself feel sad. Instead of panic, I tear trickled down my cheek. I softened.
When holding sadness, I had then more room to say to myself, “but for all the sad things in the world, there are more beautiful things. For all the bad people, there are more good people”.
And then from fear to acceptance to sadness, I found my way back to hope and presence as I let my mind wander to all the beautiful things in life right now.
And then I fell asleep.
FEELS
And with the things that feel so overwhelming like climate change, pandemics, and war? I’ve found that when we stop living from fear, we have a lot of capacity to do our best. When we stop trying to protect ourselves, our best is even better.
Being present is not ignorance. Being present is knowing that in every moment we’re giving ourselves the best chance to show up with love, compassion, and aliveness. From that energy, we’re just kinder, more patient, forgiving, motivated, and hopeful.
And to end with one last quote from this book that changed my life,
“We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to…be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.”
