Compassion

Compassion. It’s just shown up today, as my 2022 word.I haven’t been looking for one particularly, I haven’t devoted any time or thought to what an appropriate one might be for this year.2019, 2020 and 2021 were years of ‘Ease and Grace’, ‘Surrender’ and ‘Awareness’. They were years of healing and rest, unravelling, remembering and reimagining. They were full to the brim with inner work, week after week, moon after moon, shadow after shadow.I lived in surrender and self-awareness while seeking ease and learning grace, out loud, in front of those closest to me and to some extent here in front of those of you who have followed. I watched how every hurdle of inner work I made it over, rippled out into the spaces between myself and my children. I became aware of what each moment of conflict that appeared between my children and I was asking me to look at in myself. I learned to accept myself.I learned to love myself.I learned to communicate my needs.I learned to allow each moment to be just what it is.I learned to discern between my own inner voice and my layers of conditioning.I learned to notice judgments and reactions and to ask questions about where they were coming from. I learned it was almost always fear.I practiced and built and strengthened. I created and protected the space where that noticing happens, where the reaction can be slowed into a response by asking my threat response to stand down.It was a challenging, long and heavy few years and I don’t expect the work will stop in 2022. I do however feel a shift. A shift in my focus from inner work to outer work. After such an intense period of time, sitting in all of the dark layers that had been waiting to heal within me, the fears that had been controlling me for years, it’s impossible for me to not consider that every person I meet is carrying around their own version of those layers and fears too.Compassion. To suffer together.Through my suffering, I can see yours.Through my healing, I know that yours is possible too.I have desperately wanted to see and feel more compassion in the world around me, my entire life. It’s the opposite and the antidote to everything that I see and feel hurting, damaging, tearing apart and destroying our world. I have been intensely frustrated with and struggled to articulate, this lack of compassion throughout my life. I have been disheartened, hurt and helpless in the pursuit of it. I have shared so many words, written and discarded thousands more, about what feels wrong with the way our world appears to be headed and what that means for our precious children. Especially the ones who feel the world hurting the way that I do.Is it true?Is it helpful?Is it inspiring?Is it necessary?Is it kind?It’s not enough anymore to write and share what is true for me. What I put out into the world needs to consider all five of these and a sixth. Is this fear or is it compassion? Am I focused on what I’m fearful might happen or am I focused on how our suffering is the same and how we can heal together. It’s how I endeavor to teach my children. It’s how I’ve watched them change as I have changed. To be what I want to see in them rather than tell them or manipulate them into what I think they should be.I watched the movie ‘Don’t Look Up’ the other night. I laughed, like I guess I was meant to and then I have been turning over the confronting parts of it in my mind ever since. It was beautifully and confusingly gentle and light but my response to it has slowly been building from that gentle simmer to a rolling boil over a few days. I’ve been marvelling at the cleverness of those behind it and how they maintained the gentleness and lightness of “Don’t Look Up ” when I’m sure what they wanted to be saying with it was “For the love of God Look the F Up People. Why on Earth are you not looking up you idiots????”. The world needs all of us to ‘Look Up’, to be willing and able to ‘Look Up’ in so many contexts right now. To notice what is going on around us, to hear those around us and rather than filling with frustration and shouting about what we are seeing and hearing, rather than denying, fighting or ignoring it, to question and think critically, to consider all angles with compassion, with curiosity. The world needs us to stop calling each other idiots and to instead gently challenge each other, with compassion, to do better so that the next generation, our children, can see and absorb us ‘Looking Up’ in this way and be able to do the same when they are the adults and creators of the world of the future.The fact that my word for 2022 and all of this took two weeks to show up isn’t lost on me either. Patience is my second word for the year, and maybe years, ahead because this part of the journey could be and feel even longer than the healing part has. This part could go on for the rest of my time on Earth. This part requires patience and every skerrick of ease and grace that I have accumulated into my way of being. It requires steadiness and resilience. As the state of the world evolves in ways that none of us can predict or forsee over the coming years, my inner voice is telling me that Compassion and Patience will be my anchors. That they will join Surrender, Awareness, Ease and Grace and as I do my best to embody all of those things I will be sending ripples out into the world and raising three future adults who will have all of those things in them to keep rippling out when I am gone.