The Slow Way: A Blessing For The End of Summer

May you walk slower this week into the end of the summer so you can notice the nudge of the Spirit pointing to love even in the close of one story and the opening sentence of another.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

It’s my birthday this week. I’ll be forty-four. I mentioned this to a new friend the other day who immediately asked, “So how was forty-three? I mean, what did you learn this year?” 

I didn’t have an answer. But also, I was moved. Don’t you think we should be asking each other these things more often on birthdays? Maybe some of you are people who catalog and keep track each year of goals and progress. I can tell you what I read this year. (It was a lot of fiction.) And I can tell you what my work centered around. I wrote and wrote and wrote Blessed Are The Rest of Us. When I turned forty-three I had a year’s worth of research and three chapters. And now, at forty-four, I have a finished book.  But what did I learn this year? How did I grow this year? 

I tend to think we are each living our own cyclical tornado. Around and around we go, following the same themes and (hopefully?) each year narrowing our focus a little closer and closer to the true thing in the middle of us.

Maybe that’s the question I should be asking: How did I get closer to the true thing this year?

When I turned forty-three my dad had been gone for six months. I had just come to a moment in my grief when I wasn’t waking up every morning with his loss as the first thought. If the grief was a grizzly at the beginning, it had slowly transformed into a gentler animal. Still wild, capable of danger, but less terrifying. It’s a wolf puppy now—dozing close to the surface but easily poked awake. A wolf puppy is still a wolf and when it wakes I’m often surprised by its ferocity. I’m learning to live with the wolf puppy, pet it when it wakes up, accept its presence as part of my life. 

But also, being in my forties means that more and more friends and acquaintances in my life have sick or dying parents. Holding even a smidge of another friend’s pain feels extra raw. A year and a half into my own grief has taught me that this raw way of living is a gift to those who suffer. The closeness I feel to my own grief is also somehow a closeness to theirs. I’m grateful for that. 

Also:

• I learned that I do my best writing when I am holed up away from my kids, especially at this age of my life, when I don’t have the energy I used to have to write in the wee hours when my kids are sleeping.  Time away is not easy to come by, but this year I learned to make space for it, and find ways to make it happen. 

• I was reminded over and over this year that I love teenagers. I love parenting them (MUCH MORE than parenting little kids. Just telling the truth here, y’all) even through the sticky stuff. And I love teaching and befriending them. Leading the middle and high school students at my church has continued to fill me up.

• I learned that cashew milk is truly my favorite milk for smoothies, but only Elmhurst’s Milked Cashews.

• After years of pressuring myself to read literary fiction during the fall, winter, and spring, and only allowing myself lighter pop fiction in the summer, I finally realized that I actually don’t really like reading literary fiction. This has been hard to admit, as I am a person with her MFA and am supposed to want to work hard when I read fiction. But I decided to be honest with myself and realized that I would want to read a lot more if I were feeling happy about the stories I read. So I started choosing books where I knew the story would be gentle and happy at the end. This had everything to do with the fact that I was researching deep theological works for my book most of the day. And also the fact that I was grieving and was tired of sad stories. I’m grateful to be old enough that I allow myself to enjoy small delights. 

• Speaking of small delights, I embraced that I love hiking with my dog. I even bought real hiking shoes. 

• I learned to make espresso this year – how to measure it out, tamp it down, and appreciate a good crema. 

• I learned to carry more than one pair of reading glasses, and how to leave them in various places throughout my house. 

• I learned to keep my nails painted, almost all the time this year. 

• And I learned—when my two older boys went away to camp this summer—that I’m not constantly behind on laundry because something is wrong with me. I’m behind because IT’S THEIR FAULT. This made me feel so much better.

• I learned that there is almost always a good reason to celebrate by walking to the froyo place three blocks away, and I have stopped being sorry that all I want is vanilla with m&ms. 

How did I grow this year? 

Ten years ago I told myself that when wrinkles really began to show up on my face I wanted them to be grooves of my own laughter, lines marking a life well lived and joyful. Ten years later? The most pronounced lines are the ones that have come from clinching my jaw in worry all day and night. I’m bummed about that. Life is a tornado of growing, right? Getting closer to the true thing. I hope the true thing is an eventual release from the anxiety that pronounces worry lines over laugh lines, but that may not come to pass.

How did I grow this year? I got a little closer to the truth, I think. Bodies don’t lie. Wrinkles don’t lie about how we spend our lives. Jaw clinching or smiling. I know who I want to be. And forty-four years is helping me see that we never find our way to the true thing through hard work, as has been the story I’ve been shaking off for years. We find our way there through delight and wonder and meaning. 

I wrote a book this year and it was hard. I wanted it to come with less stress. I wanted to feel like I had control. I still want to have rhythms in my life that match the story I tell of what matters. Sometimes I lived those rhythms. But most of the time I didn’t. Every year I look into the future and imagine days filled with less chaos, more intentionality. I may never get there.

But I’m coming into this fresh year understanding that the lines on my face have already arrived, and my invitation is to create more and more of a life where the laugh lines win over the anxiety lines. That’s my call. It depends on what I take on, how I protect my time and my family’s time, what honor I give to my own health and joy, and the ways I connect with the Spirit who relaxes my jaw. 

Honestly, life is worthy of the anxiety lines. The last ten years of my life have earned the stress I’ve learned to carry. But what will I do with it and how will I move closer to the true thing at the center? More froyo runs, more happy fiction, and more hikes with my dog? 

I pray that for all of us as we move out of summer and into all that this season of fall holds: More froyo, more happy fiction, more hikes. And more practices that connect our bodies and hearts to the Spirit who relaxes our jaws. 

A Slow Practice

For our practice today, I hope you’ll spend some time receiving this blessing. For me, it’s a blessing for a new year of life. But for most of us, whether we have kids or are in the education field or not, the transition of summer into fall is an important one. It’s a time we move from vacation mode into structure. So let this be a blessing you carry as you transition into this new season of commitments, schedules, and shorter days.

A Blessing for the End of Summer

You want the light to last forever but it's already casting shadows too early on the evening walk. And soon the breeze will break the heat wave you’ve been longing to break, and even that will ache. Sometimes relief is also a hurt. 

You had plans for all you would accomplish—the basement clean out, the important conversation with that friend, the journaling—and here you are, same imperfect human, tasks left undone. Every year another similar version of you, still moving from August to September, hoping this year you get it right.

Blessed are you for reaching, dear one. You who long for the evening daylight of early July. (It only lasts a moment, doesn’t it?) Blessed are you who are waiting for the heat to finally break, for the kids to finally give you a break, for good wisdom to finally break through. Blessed are you who stare in the mirror and think how did summer come and go again? And how am I here in this body that ages but is never satisfied?

Do you remember the song you sang as a kid when you were let loose in the yard, untethered to the life you know now that keeps you moving? How you spun in circles as you sang it or lay on the trampoline and watched the clouds move past like magic?

Do you remember how you knelt down before the rolly polly and held your finger out and watched it choose you? It wandered up the hill of your hand, its vulnerable bits of leg brushing your skin as if you were the land it had always intended to climb? You kept your arm still so it wouldn’t frighten, so it wouldn’t know the truth, that you were capable of crushing its gray armored body. I want that for you again, dear. The stillness, the delight. The trust that there is something to hold quiet for, that the small thing is worthy of watching, that the life you live can be delighted in. 

This is a blessing for you who can’t even remember what it was like to send your kids to school. It was so long ago. Or you who longed for kids to send and never received that joy. You whose ache clangs hollow every year when this season arrives.

This is a blessing for you who long to walk through a late summer garden again, but the body you once knew is no longer carrying you anywhere.

This is a blessing for you who have moved through summer and into this moment with no change. Your life feels the drag of monotony.

This is a blessing for you, who runs from task to necessary task. All good, all important. You who cannot stop to let the rolly polly climb your finger, but who longs to. 

May the last late light of summer glow spread wide enough to stir your longing for whatever it is your body, your soul, your heart is asking you to notice. May you walk slower this week into the end of the summer so you can listen to the stirring. May you notice the nudge of the Spirit pointing to love even in the close of one story and the opening sentence of another. 

May you be blessed.  

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A note for next week: I’ll be away next week and am taking a one week break from writing the Slow Way letter. I’ll see you here September 2.