Best Feeling of the Week
A theme that came up across conversations with friends, clients, and classmates throughout last week was the idea of learning to embrace the gray. The gray could be an in-between moment in life, like moving from being a student to taking on adulthood full steam ahead with one’s first job. The gray could be the feeling of getting your bearings with a new schedule. It could also be not feeling comfortable in your body, but learning how to, instead, embrace the feeling rather than run away from it or punish oneself. It especially comes up with eating and dietary theories—people are all-in keto or all-in plant-based vegans.
How do we learn to be comfortable with the uncomfortable and avoid falling into black-and-white thinking? If there’s anything 2020 has perhaps been trying to teach us, it’s just that. This entire year has been gray. We are neither back to full-fledged “normal” nor are we in the first stages of pandemic lockdown. Our collective consciousness is not where it was six or seven months ago, but justice has not been served. The election is just ahead and we do not yet know what the outcome will be, but damn, do we feel the pressure and anxiety of it.
On a broad level, living in the gray has taught us to have tough conversations, to sit with challenging feelings, to dig deeper, to learn more.
And what about personally? What does this mean in the lens of one’s relationship with herself, her health, her body, her mental health?
I’ll speak from my sole experience here. When things feel really gray, really unclear, really out of my hands, I tend to lean into false control to steady myself. I lean on regiments, crafting new goals, putting myself on a new schedule, committing to a new workout routine. But as I mentioned a few weeks ago, that simply wasn’t working for me anymore. My false sense of control was just that—false. The very idea of it was false and anything it was temporarily supplying me was false, too. An illusion.
What I’m trying to remind myself is that no two days are ever the same. What happens today will not necessarily happen tomorrow. The feeling that overwhelms me today may not overwhelm me tomorrow. But today, this is what this day is about. Then, I move into, well, this is what this hour is about. Maybe I won’t feel this way by noon. This feeling or this thought does not have to color the entire day. Perhaps it will shift, evolve, move on. What’s imperative is that I’m facing the feeling. I’m not running away from it. I’m not trying to cover it up with a new goal or a new task or a new whatever. The feeling is here. It’s here for a reason. What is it showing me?
I feel that in America especially, we fall into either/or, black-and-white thinking. You can EITHER be this thing OR this thing. You can either believe this or this. You are either defined by this one thing or this other thing. Are we forgetting that we’re all human, and as humans, we contain multitudes? There’s no one color for all the colors we contain within us. There are moments in life that are neither good nor bad…but why do we automatically associate gray with the negative?
There is something that happens daily that especially anyone by the beach widely observes and embraces. Every night, there are a few magical minutes as the sun makes its descent. It glows brighter, more orange, more vibrant than it has all day. The sky turns neither daytime blue nor nighttime black— it instead turns a gradient of pinks, oranges, yellows. As day becomes night, we stare in awe at the in-between moment. We love it. We admire it. We can’t believe we captured it. We see that in-between doesn’t always have to be gray. It can, in fact, be one of the most beautiful things we’ve seen all day.