I love IKEA. Let me tell you why. First, I like the little arrows on the floor that discretely whisper “Shhh, follow me! You’ve already been that way!” Without the arrows, the store layout would be impossible for someone like me to navigate, and I would have to leave (if I even managed to find an exit) with that nagging feeling, “but did I see EV-ER-Y-THING?”

When I walk into IKEA, solutions to problems, even problems I didn’t know I had are everywhere. If you think about it, finding a solution is really the best time to find out you have a problem. Sometimes I feel like I am just one storage bin away from my whole life making sense and usually the cost is something I can manage and if it isn’t, it’s still a soothing dream. I can tell myself for example, “One day, that rug is going to tie it all together”. IKEA is all about staying where you are, but making it work better. A beautiful, simple, affordable solution; isn’t that what we all want?

I think that’s why people look mostly pretty happy wandering IKEA with their paper measuring tapes (the sign they mean business) and giant shopping bags on their shoulders. It doesn’t hurt that if you play your cards right, there is the possibility of an ice-cream cone on the way out. What could go wrong? Everything is possible. Everything will be better from now on. That’s how I feel anyways. Tell me I’m not the only one. (Seriously, tell me). 

But I went through a season … quick aside, why on earth do we call years that nearly broke us “seasons”? As a Canadian on the prairies I know 4 seasons, but they are not divided equally no matter what Environment Canada tells us. Winter is forever, summer is too short, fall to me is like watching someone descend into a bad mood and spring is kind of a joke until it smartens up. In summary, when I say I went through a “season” from here on in I mean a forever winter, not a too short summer. Ok. Let’s move on. In this season I speak of I was grieving a lot of things and felt like a zombie at times. On certain days, I wouldn’t know where to be, where to go. Sometimes I would just get in the car and drive without having yet decided where my destination would be. If I kept driving long enough, from time to time I would wind up at IKEA. Out of habit, I would offer the greeter who seemed to be expecting me my good vein as I hopped aboard the escalator-for-a-better-tomorrow. I wanted to feel that sense of hope. I wanted to see solutions. I wanted to make something, anything beautiful.

On one particular day, I remember wandering around IKEA and being overcome with what I can only describe as a sense of meaninglessness mixed with hopelessness mixed with reality settling in HARD. The colour went out, and no arrows, however well-meaning could direct me out of feeling so lost inside of my own life. There was something about all the people and their hopeful measuring tapes, who looked so normal and apparently unaware that life as you know it can come crashing down inbetween lunch and suppertime. I fantasized about standing on a desk and making a despairing announcement to everyone in a big voice like a bearer of bad news aboard the Titanic. It would have gone something like, “You know, none of this is going to fix anything! A new coffee table can’t fix your marriage, or heal your disease, or whatever is broken!!! It’s not your old tea towels that are preventing you from evolving to a better you any more than the ladle in your disorganized kitchen drawer that never opens properly is responsible for your grudge against your father or you never feeling good enough. Just making sure…Continue on then…Don’t mind me…” 

Best case scenario, a hush would fall over the crowd and everyone would look around at each other nodding in agreement,  lowering their bags like ashamed Christmas shoppers caught in the sin of commercialism. Likely, one by one they would come forward and lay their tiny pencil in my outstretched hand as a sign of solidarity but mostly as a token of gratitude for the brave message. The less favourable way I imagined this going down involved the nice yellow-shirt people coming quickly to hoist me off of my platform, wrap me in the nearest throw and haul me away. I would have let them. It would have felt nice to be carried around in a blanket those days. I think part of what was hard was that I just missed blending in, feeling normal, feeling like myself. I get that the speech wouldn’t have moved the needle towards normal even a little. 

I was fearful of how long the winter was going to be and of who I would even be by the end of it. Would I still be me? Surely these things change us in the forever kind of way like a limp or scar that didn’t used to be there. A day comes when it’s time to roll up our sleeves and settle in for the hard work of facing pain and accepting healing, a rebuild that requires so much more than an allen key. But who knows how long that work takes? Dealing with pain is so much easier when we know when the end point is, or that there even is one.

For me,  it can be very tempting at this point to say, “Good enough” and most days it is. But other days I hear the rattle of broken things that time (in the form of a million conversations, books and prayers) hasn’t swept away and the idea of throwing an area rug at that heap sounds like a simple and beautiful solution. “All good here! Pay no attention to that lumpy rug!” But I don’t really want to live that way. I think of the celebrated “Demo Day” on Fixer Upper where sledgehammers often recklessly destroy a home often within inches of seriously harming someone. My husband tells me that’s not really how it’s done in real life, but I think that IS how real life feels sometimes. First experience demolition, then experience the re-build. Sometimes that is the only way. Death and then Life. 

Like with most renovations or building projects I often worry I am falling behind schedule and wonder if there a way to do this quicker and without so much effort and emotions involved? But, I don’t want to be a layers of wallpaper over mold kind of person, I want to be willing to deal with whatever lurks behind even if that means washing dishes in the bathtub for a while. That mold makes me act weird sometimes and say stupid stuff or feel hurt when nothing is happening and besides it makes forgiveness hard. It’s in the air my children and husband breathe and for crying out loud I have asthma!! So… I’ll keep working at it, I guess. See you at IKEA! Just kidding…. No, you will totally see me there, I love it. But I won’t be fooled again IKEA, you can’t fix me.

 

I like words. A name is the sort of thing I could easily spend years in my head over, but I couldn’t justify not starting a blog based on not coming up with the perfect name. Besides, I don’t even know what this thing is yet. If I have to think too many steps ahead, or have to know now, it robs the joy of the adventure. The future is a place where anxiety and fear live so staying present and dealing with today and maybe next week are good places to be when possible. Creative endeavors are practices in being present with myself so having said all that, here is what Grit and Company means to me now.

On Grit

If you have ever stood beside me, you may have noticed I’m “short” or as the French say more politely, “petite”, as in I have always rounded up to the nearest half inch. I am 5 foot, 2 inches AND A HALF (last I checked which if anything has changed I’d be comfortable not knowing). As a kid I thought of my smallness as being a gift in games of hide-and-seek or my love of gymnastics, but as I grew older it felt like a deficit. Probably to do with this crazy culture of supermodel beauty in the form of long legs, but by the time I was a teenager I could see my frame wasn’t built for runways and held the knowing that my future husband would have to settle for less.

Logic could not predict that in Junior High I would learn that I loved playing basketball. I loved the running, the shooting but also standing my ground and owning the space I took up. What I lacked in height I made up for in feistiness, at times like an annoying mosquito to girls whose arms could reach much higher than mine. I loved catching them being sloppy, having wrongly assumed I was no threat. I loved grabbing the ball away from the other team, and if I ended up thrown on the ground arms hugging the ball as if my very life depended on it, it was likely I was keeping it.

I’m pretty sure it was grade 10, when I had Mr. Reimer (which may or may not be his real name) as a coach. He was student teaching at the time and I remember him telling us his dream was to get (pretend) angry at the ref and throw his clipboard on the ground. A couple years ago now, a teacher-friend of mine took a course with him and somehow they connected both knowing me, as he had become principle at the school my kids were attending. His observations about me way back then, were something like that I had “grit mixed with a helping of humour”. I didn’t mind this take on me one bit and it’s probably the nicest thing ever said about me behind my back! He had this memory of a game where some girl offended me (quite possibly by knocking me over) and for the remainder of the game he said I wasn’t even playing basketball anymore, but had moved on to working out justice for myself on that girl.

The word “grit” landed on me with a reverence for my young self amidst an otherwise amusing story. He had seen something in me then that I wouldn’t know for 20 years or so how much I would need that part of me to hold out. Not the part of holding a grudge in a basketball game but having fight in me to get back up and keep going. Of course he had no way of knowing what turns my life had taken since adolescent basketball but I felt reconnected to my young self and thankful for the reminder that I have been me for a long time.

When I think of the word “Grit”, I think of resilience and tenacity and I can’t pretend life hasn’t required these things from me. I am beyond thankful be to still standing and upright. But I’d be lying if I said it was me and my grit that gets me through because that’s only a piece of what is true in my story.

On Company

There are times I want to hide and disconnect. It usually happens suddenly and around suppertime when I notice the gas in my tank doesn’t match the distance left to the next pit stop. I know the feeling of needing a reprieve from exposed lightbulbs whose light offends me like a request from a migraine to take hold. I like one sound at a time for the most part. Also, one person talking to me at a time is best, and preferably not over television. While I’m on the topic of television I will say that it being on with no one watching is as wasteful to me leaving a tap running for the way it drains my personal energy resources. I don’t know why. Sometimes I wish I could turn my “noticer” down as my senses seem bent on bringing in as much information in as possible at all times. Sometimes less is a pathway to more peace, and I’m still learning how to do this well in ways that don’t involve me disappearing from the dinner table with my plate – which I think I have done only once in real life.

But still….actually it is almost always true that it is connection to other people that gives life to me. When I am feeling overwhelmed and frayed I don’t need to be alone, I just need to be pulled in – to a person – and this is where I most often find my own heartbeat again. My favourite relationships are the ones where laughter and tears both flow and sometimes together. This is rarely pretty, but it is always beautiful. I think because I find meaning in being real and acceptance in being true, I’m not very good at small talk. It’s like going to the beach but not being able to take your socks off. Talking about the weather is pretty boring to me, unless of course the weather reminds you of an argument you had with your mother, or makes you wistful for the optimism of childhood or something like that – then I could concede weather is an interesting topic. Also, I suppose farmers probably find weather interesting and I get that. Look, I’m not saying the weather is not important. It probably is, but forgive me if my mind wanders.

I do better connected to others, being known feels like love to me and being trusted is a gift I don’t receive lightly. I have learned to be a better version of myself because of the company I keep. Friends who inspire me with their lives and challenge me to do better, or reflect back to me places not yet healed, or point me to Faith…I consider this all beauty. Surviving pain while well surrounded is the best outcome we can hope for when life goes that way, and it does, and it will.

This journey would be so lonely without others to mark the path with to say, “look how far we’ve come! I bet we can get over that next bit after a rest and some coffee and cake!” (depending on who is eating sugar that week). I like to think we all carry different pieces of the map and it seems best we travel together. Especially I was never meant to travel alone as I am particularly terrible with navigation and the sort of person prone to getting lost. And if we make each other mad or sad because the bright lights made us do it, or the noise in the background made us fearful and anxious we apologize (if we are the sort of company we should be keeping)…and then we get back to the good stuff of company.

Thanks for stopping by!

And don’t worry, I’m sure I won’t be publishing posts this often normally. I’m just getting started. I’m not that ridiculous. For the most part.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know what I’m doing! I’m not even sure if blogging is still a thing exactly. It might be good to mention here at the start that I’m the sort of person who gets excited about ideas but then sometime after spectacular dream-like brainstorming I get overwhelmed by technical details (why are computers so mean to me?) or generally my limited skill set also known as reality which brings the project to a complete and utter halt. My etsy store is a perfect example. I have a legit etsy store which I never actually posted a single item for sale, like ever. Inventory count zero. This is who I am.

I always marvel at people who have no business doing what they are doing and just do it anyways and they make a way where there wasn’t one. Like most things it’s probably my parents’ fault. I didn’t grow up with a “can do” attitude, more of a “do you have permission for that?” kind of thing. Or maybe I’m just flawed and insecure. A letter from the Queen would go a long way with me inviting me to pursue whatever I want, or audible God would be even nicer.

However, I turned 40 this year and I keep hearing that when you are 40 you don’t care anymore about those things. The letter from the Queen keeps not arriving and anyways it doesn’t matter now. I’ve been talking to God too and it’s like we’re both kicking dust around with our sneakers, and I’m like, “yeah, but what do YOU want to ?” and he’s like “yeah, but what do YOU want to do?”…and it’s getting on my nerves and wasting precious time…because like I said, I’m 40 now and who knows how many more years I have of making sense left?

So basically if you are reading this and wondering, “who does she think she is?” or “doesn’t she know the world does not need to witness another blogger beating dead horses with buzzing bonnets and metaphors”…I know, because I had the same thought!

But here we are.

I’m kind of excited.

I’m also sweating.

Thanks for listening.

(even if you just skimmed real fast, because really it’s ok.) Also, I don’t know what to do with that watery sunset below, so I’ll just leave it for now. It’s going to be like this.