Reconnecting

It’s so easy to get caught up in day to day trials and tribulations, I realized recently. It’s been a strange winter for this part of Alberta and I am missing the cold frosty days and brilliant sunshine that usually accompanies January through March. Teased with many unseasonably warm and wet days that turned into icy roads and grey skies has played havoc with my psyche and, unintentionally I withdrew in my busy-ness cocoon of year-end work. People were tired of me playing my hand of tiredness/too much work/no energy and stopped asking. I completely lost my sense of life-work balance.
 
A chance opportunity made me reach out to a friend to connect and we spent a wonderful evening catching up on the goings-on in our respective lives. My heart was light when we parted, to meet again in a month. I was stunned to realize what along with the sunlight, what I was missing in my life was my people – those friends and family and outside of my work family. Burrowed so deeply in my work, I had failed to come up for air, for life-sustaining rejuvenation and sustenance.

Of course I always have my husband but he too has been busy both at work and at home. He recently reconnected with our home renovations and does his best work without me lurking about.  That meant I had some free evenings, if I could muster the energy and reach out.

To remind myself of what I needed to do, I dug out my rules for life list and turned it into a Toastmasters speech.  My Toastmasters club is one of the high points of my week – no matter how tired I am, I leave those meetings energized and refreshed. After delivering my speech, I chatted with several people and realized that I wasn’t the only one in a mid-winter rut.  We all weren’t aware we were even in a rut – we just knew that something was off.  

The world wasn’t going to come to me and say “hey, girl, what do you need?” I needed to open my heart and step back into the world. And because I’m me, of course I made a plan on how to do exactly that.

Turns out I didn’t need the plan. An email from an old friend was in my inbox the following morning, followed by an invitation to lunch from another friend I’d hadn’t really talked to much since before Christmas. It was as if universe has heard my plan and reopened the path for me. Or was it always open but it was me who’d had my eyes closed?

It is these connections in my life that sustain me. It’s like coming out of a long dark tunnel, blinking in the sudden sunlight, basking in the warmth. Maybe I appreciate it more because I tend to slip into my cocoon now and again or maybe it’s just the yin and yang of balance – you can’t have one without the other.

All I know is that right now, my world is as it should be. Reconnected.