“Lean in,” I heard. It was a simple, quiet statement. I knew what it meant instantly and it scared me. It meant:

\ Stretching a little farther in embracing (even the idea of) joy and hope for the future.

\ Releasing more fear that the bottom might drop out. Again.
\ Trusting that the worst is behind and the best is yet unfolding.

Lean in. Drink deep…

So what’s the last thing you heard? Do you remember? Have you finally stopped long enough yet during this quarantine to ask?

Resting is about more than jumping on a plane and getting away from it all or having a whole five minutes, hour, or day to oneself. You can be in either of those scenarios and many others and still not run into it. Why??

GUILT 

Good ol’ fashioned guilt. 

Yesterday Nipsey Hussle died. Rapper to some. Visionary to others. Father, son, brother, and friend to a few. Humanitarian and man of the people to most. We met a couple times, were from the same hometown on Los Angeles’ westside, and we travelled in some of the same circles in the LA entertainment orbit but I can’t say I ‘knew’ him. Still…I can feel it.

When hard times come, does it automatically mean that they are solely meant to harm a person or destroy their lives? Or could those same hard times be there to shape and mold that person in a way that no other method could do or could do as completely and quickly?

I was not-so-silently fuming at no one but myself. I’d been here before and felt the cold, dark or dryness of having pushed the ‘grace period’ mentality only to find there was no grace period. I knew better but I insisted and no one was really affected by that recurring obstinance but me. I was furious – at the injustice but mostly just at myself. And then a memory hit me. I remembered another time when one day made all the difference in the world and utterly changed the trajectory of my life forever.

Some time ago, I had a friend who shared a house with me on alternative days/weeks when I was in town and vice versa. On one of my trips in town that coincided with one of her trips out of town, I arrived to the house to find it a mess and all the food I’d left 10 days earlier either eaten, given away or tossed out. I was a little low on cash, tired from traveling, and possessed little to no desire to go grocery shopping as soon as I got back. When I asked about the missing food and general ‘ugh’ of the house, I got a plate of evasive answers paired with a juicy slice of remorselessness washed down with a tall glass of ‘get over it…I already have’.

When I moved to Cabo in Oct 2017, not really knowing a soul save one person, I approached it the same as I had every vacation over the past 20 years to the same locale: I LOVED IT!! But after almost a year of globetrotting from this country to that, I was nearly broke. With no desire to return to accounting in any form and with no clear idea what was to happen next…

I realized then that I had continued to hold onto one residual thought; one remnant feeling that was very effective at preventing me from moving forward with any sense of urgency. That residual remnant was this: that there was something to ‘go back’ to.