Life is Extra

We are all stressed. Our people are out of sorts – the grands, the parents, the kids, the teens, the college crew and the young adults. Everyone’s lives are stretched and contracted in ways that we did not sign up for. When our tribe is agitated we become stressed, and life feels like a lot of EXTRA. What should we do with the EXTRA?

Some of the extra is beyond our control. Illness happens, and meticulously crafted plans get turned upside down or scrapped all together. Life is picking up speed but no one is cheerfully reciting the GPS turn by turn directions in our ear or calmly rerouting us around accidents and traffic backups. We are flying down a wide open road with the headlights off playing chicken with ourselves and hoping somebody isn’t doing the same thing coming from the opposite direction. Okay that is all a little dramatic, but you get the picture. We are all flying by the seat of our pants here. There are a lot of questions and not an equal amount of solid answers.

I read the historical novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a while back and that book has hauntingly stayed with me. The novel follows the lives of a charming, funny, brave and compassionate group of island residents during the final stages of German occupation. To imagine that people had actual lives with humor and heartbreak during such a horrible time in history has been something that I think about often when reading the news. I try to humanize the detailed accounts of pain and suffering that fill the back and white columns of newspaper pages with thoughts of mothers smiling at their cooing babies and young people innocently flirting with each other when the adults aren’t looking. In my imagination, life, even at its most unimaginable, must still have moments of humanness. Here too is the EXTRA.

This EXTRA is what makes us humans different. Our capacity to adapt is unparalleled. There is a huge trust factor here, because this level of adaptation sometimes means flying down that dark road with the headlights off. We don’t know what is coming but can do our best with the now. We can be present with others in meaningful ways. We can be human with all the messiness and wonder that entails. We can form stronger connections to those we love and challenge ourselves to connect with those we don’t fully understand. This is what we do with the EXTRA. We can become EXTRA and history writes its own narrative.