{the difference between it'll be ok and it is well}

Do you know how many things you could be worrying about right now?

I do. I've thought of every single thing, I'm pretty sure. And I could help you.

I could be the opposite of a therapist. An oppopist. A pessipist. An misanthropoppopessipist.

I could lay you down on the Couch and explain to you why you're not anxious enough. About germs. And your appearance. And your future. And robbers. And the government. And Alzheimer's. And people you love. And HUMANITY.

!

You could pay me thousands of dollars and leave with a complete awareness of every little thing that could go wrong, has gone wrong, absolutely will go wrong. I could help you analyze your life up until this point and we could pick out every moment that has defined you and brought you to this horrible, pitiable, hopeless state. I could be like the ghost in that Charles Dickens book that shows you your grave. I could take a petri dish and grow you a whole culture of icky bacteria from just the tip of your finger because you don't wash your hands well enough. But I digress.

You could explain to me why you're not worried about those things and I could laugh at you and call you naive. "Things go wrong all the time, every day, to everyone!" I'll say. "The world is sad. Everyone is sad. Even the happy people. You're no exception. You're doing everything wrong. Even if you're doing everything right, there are too many things that are out of your control. Your life will fall all to pieces. Probably soon."

And you're probably saying (in your head, so that no one overhears you talking to yourself and thinks you've gone crazy), "That's dumb. No one would pay to lay there and listen to you talk like that..."

But we're all our own misanthropoppopessipists. You lay on your own couch and let yourself talk. You know you follow yourself around all day listing worries. Maybe you're not as good at it as I am (or maybe you are) but you do it.

And the worst part of it is that we're both actually probably right. You're doing stuff wrong. Your life will fall all to pieces from time to time. Things, little and large, do go horribly awry, every day, and no one is exempt from that.

Your worries are not completely unfounded. I know, it does us no good to dwell on them, but I'm just saying: a lot of them are legit.

This comes up because I was thinking this morning about this baby I'm having. Because I think about him. He's a tad thought-consuming. And I thought about all the things that could go wrong right now, and all the things that could go wrong later. There are a stupid lot of things. I laid down on the mental couch for a session. And then I thought of that guy. You know? That guy?

He was a prominent lawyer who lived in Chicago in the 1860s. He got married in 61, had five kids, lost his four-year-old son in 1870 to pneumonia. The next year, he invested in crazy amounts of real estate. Then the whole "Great Fire of Chicago" happened and destroyed most of his investment.

Two years later, he decided to take his family on a vacation to England. His wife and four daughters went on ahead of him when he was delayed by business. Their steamship, the Ville Du Havre, was hit by an iron sailing vessel and 226 people died. Including all four of his daughters. He got this telegram from his wife afterward that began, "Saved alone..."

It's a pretty sad story. Awfully sad, actually.  But the part I really like about the story is that after his daughters died, he sailed across the Atlantic to Wales to meet up with his wife, and as his ship passed over the location where his daughters died he wrote that song, "It Is Well With My Soul".

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way// When sorrows like sea billows roll// Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say: It is well, it is well with my soul

So I guess I'm not trying to say that everything will be ok. I hate it when people say that everything will be ok. I mean, Horatio Spafford, the guy in the story, lost another four year-old son seven years after the boat thing. That's six. Six kids. And then he suffered a lot through mental illness and died. That's not very ok.

But it got me thinking about the difference between "it is going to be ok" and "it is well with my soul." One you can't say with any certainty at all, and one is a sure thing.

One means you'll be happy someday (at least until the next catastrophe strikes) and one means you have peace now.

One is kind of an empty lie that people tell to other people because they really hope it's true, and one is bursting so full of hope because it doesn't depend on anything you can or can't control in this life.

One depends on your strength as a person and one depends entirely on God's strength, which is good because I'm weak and I know it.

Anyway. It's a lot of thoughts for a Thursday morning, but I guess this means that my inner un-therapist is fired. It kind of takes the edge off of worrying when you know that even if every single thing went wrong that possibly could, it won't destroy you. Peace like a river. Good.

{back at it}

I'm settled in my office this morning with a scone and some music I haven't listened to in a while, working on my script for today's show. We started back up again for the fall a couple weeks ago, and it's fun. I've missed my mic and teleprompter.

I was happy to have the summer off though. Everything this year came to a stand-still about mid-June. The evenings became like big empty caves that I'd yell into without echo, because there was nothing for miles and miles to bounce my voice back. Sure, there was moving. Selling the house and buying a new one. There was morning sickness, lots of that. And as a result, there were countless hours of sleeping and eating crackers. There were doctor's appointments and little summer road trips and a wedding or two and friends. But nowhere I really had to be every week, nothing to prepare for, no students to teach. The whole summer is just a sun-bleached, foggy, sort-of memory.

I stopped writing because it felt like there was nothing to write about. I stopped doing anything even remotely creative because my brain went into Exist-And-That's-It mode. And after the craziness that was last spring, I absolutely loved it. I needed it. But now, I'm ready to have someplace to go and be and something to do there. Something to wake my brain and my fingers up and clear the pathways between them. Something to talk about when people ask what I've "been up to".

So, for today, it's nostalgic music and script-writing and taping my little music segment.

{send flowers}

There's a skiff of snow on the lawn, the roof, the streets. We've dipped down into the minus temperatures and the sky is the colour of your face when you're very, very afraid. But the grass is still green and there are floridly orange leaves clinging to the shivering branches of the apple tree in my backyard.

It's too early to lament the coming of winter, but fall is definitely on its deathbed.

Send flowers and say your goodbyes.

{vancouver}

We did it! We left.

And, of course, we came back. Because if you don't come back, it's not so much a vacation as it is running away. 

It was perfect. It was nice. It wasn't anything crazy, but it was chill and sleepy and fun, with the exact right ratios of walking around to eating to sleeping to beaches to mountains to skyscrapers to parks to cozy little coffee shops and good conversations about pasts and futures and presents. Our hotel was right smack-dab in the centre of downtown Vancouver, so we walked everywhere (except for when we took the ferry). We walked to Granville Island, to Stanley Park, to Gastown, to Yaletown. We walked to restaurants and beaches and shopping centres and to the aquarium. And when we were too tired to walk, we didn't. That's our prerogative. This will most likely be our last trip just the two of us for quite a while. We talked about that a lot. I think this week was really us trying to push the pause button. Not stop, just pause. Because as exciting as the future is, it's coming awfully fast. And I really am enjoying the present. Today, we are back to real life. Play.

{being a tourist}

We're going away on a little trip soon, and I'm so excited. Airplanes. Airplanes.

There is something so wonderful about being out of everyone's reach. Turning off your cell phone and not feeling bad about it.

Waking up to an empty schedule and a continental breakfast, even if it's only coffee and a muffin. Going or staying or both. Buying a book and finding a quiet place to read it. Window shopping, getting on a bus because it just looks like it's going somewhere nice, making up fake histories for the people who get on and off, putting your headphones in and creating a soundtrack for their stories.

Finding a venue and seeing whoever's playing because the cover charge is cheap. Walking around dodgy streets because you don't know better. Buying something little to remind you that you were here. Taking pictures of things that other people see every day and find boring. Being a tourist. I love it.

{moon king}

I went to a show last night. It'd been a while, I felt, since I'd been to one.

And it was fine, it was good. Even though the website said that the show would be $10 and when we got there the guy at the door said it was $20, and even though the website said the show would start at 7:30 and it was after 9:30 by the time the opening band took the stage, and even though the room was overly hot and the acoustics were terrible and there was a guy trying to mosh and push people around even though it wasn't even remotely a punk show.

I can love the music while hating the venue, I guess.

Anyway. The point is not that. The point is that the opener played a pretty fantastic set. They were called Moon King and were magically able to make me momentarily forget about the ridiculously moody door guy for about half an hour.
But only for half an hour.

{how to catch it}

Motivation is a slippery and elusive creature. How do you catch it? How do you hold onto it? And what do you do when it goes away?

I don't know about you, but I walk around the house looking for it. It's never in the fridge, but I usually check there first. Food is sometimes an acceptable substitute for Motivation.

So then I'm walking around the house with a yogurt or a tupperware of leftovers or whatever and I peek into the office, and the bedroom, and the bathroom. I ponder the walls. I need to hang some pictures on the walls. The walls are bare. I feel like if I had some pretty pictures on the walls, I would find some Motivation there. But I have no Motivation to put pictures on the walls. This is cyclical, and straight-up depressing.

I check the fridge again. I sit on the couch. Motivation is never on the couch, even more than it is never in the fridge. If I would not sit on the couch with whatever I found in the fridge, I could maybe find some Motivation. But I have no Motivation to get off of the couch.

I am stuck on the couch.

I look at my feet. I look at my knees. Growing up, I had very knobby knees. There is nothing motivational about knobby knees.

But that was where I found myself yesterday morning. On the couch with my knees and my food and a complete lack of any Motivation whatsoever. Laundry to be done, dishes to be washed, even pictures to hang. Stuck on the couch.

Then I remembered, faintly, that sometimes before I've found Motivation outside. Like it's a two-year-old trying to run away and I've just got to go catch it. But I also knew that I couldn't get off of the couch without a good reason. So, with my last little shred of willpower and determination, like a drowning person stretching their weary arm just above the water in the hope that someone will see it and grab it, I texted Kiersten and asked if she'd go for a walk with me. When she said yes, I was then obligated to get myself off of the couch and into some shoes. (I don't think Obligation and Motivation are the same thing, but I think they're related somehow. Obligation is maybe Motivation's rich, snobby great-aunt. She makes you do things by yelling at you and waving her cane around and reminding you about manners and not inviting people places and then not showing up.)

So it was that I made it off of the couch and into some shoes and into the car and to the lake. And Kiersten, true to her word, was there, her son in his stroller. My metaphorical lifeguard. We set off.

And thankfully, just around the first corner, there was Motivation. Sitting on the dock kicking water at the geese. We walked for an hour, and I was happy to find that I wanted to, and it was such a relief to want to do something. And when I got home, I wanted to clean up the place and put supper in the crock pot and do my work.

Anyway, to make a long story longer, I am very thankful for good friends and fresh air and geese and the lake. I'm still not sure how to hold onto Motivation, but at least I know what I need to do next time I lose it.