Imagine that you had a bike with no brakes. You just used your feet when you had to slow it down. You never even questioned why your bike came without brakes, you just rode it. Figuring out along the way how to keep yourself safe. You lived your whole life with this bike and one day someone asked you to take theirs down the street for them. You would do them a favor. Without a thought in the world, you got on the bike and rode it. When it was time to slow down and stop, your hands naturally held on to the brakes feeling an unfamiliar ease, a kind of sudden freedom. You may even go as far as to say, you encountered the kind of slow motion, time standing still type of slowing down that feels like you are on a movie set. The wind blowing on your hair the right amount of air. You finally arrive at the spot your friend told you about and, as you are about to step off the bike, you sob. Right there on the street. Your friend sees you from afar and is rushing towards you, thinking that you fell and hurt yourself. ‘What is wrong?’ she asks. You don’t even know how to tell her you have never used brakes before in your life. How you scraped your feet on the asphalt every day for as long as you can remember. How you did not know how it felt to not have to. You just realized that you lived life in a way that was harder than everyone else’s and you didn’t even know it. You thought everyone struggled the way you did, you thought everyone rode the bike the way you did, and that those handle brakes were just there for show. You did not know it was so that you could rest your feet on the pedals. So that you could keep safe when a car jumped in front of you. So that you could slow down without having to scrape every sole you ever owned. You gave the bike to your friend and just turned to walk back to yours. Thoughts swimming as if they are drowning in your head. You look at your feet and they are full of small sneaky rocks and sticky dust. You never had shiny shoes on them. As you approach the bike, you know what you have to do. But before you do, you tell yourself that it will take time to forgive the part of you who just survived without asking if there was a better way. The part of you that never wondered if everyone endured that same daily hardship. How you didn’t notice the shiny shoes everyone else had on but you. The day will come when forgiveness will set in. While you are finally riding the bike, you should have had all along. Your shoes are glimmering in the sunlight and you are enjoying the turns and twists of the road. You notice the wind in your hair. And you don’t have to carry wash clothes in your bag to care for the shoes. Sometimes there are parts in our lives that are really hard, but we never question them. We just find a way to get through them, never indulging in the possibility that we don’t have to work so hard, or live this way. Without questioning what is and what has always been, we miss the fancy handle brakes and the chance to have nice shoes. It may not be everything, but when we just get by in life with parts that don’t have to be so hard, then the things that do, feel even worse. Recently, I realized that a hard part of my life didn’t need to be that hard. I was furious at myself for not knowing this sooner. For not knowing that I didn’t have to scrape the soles of my shoes. Oh my friend, what a lesson that was. It had me sitting staring out my backyard for a while. Remembering all the times I was scraping down the streets with a brakeless bike that I didn’t have to have. As I was staring, I knew that this moment of knowing was immeasurable. It felt like art. Like a Picasso showing up at my front door. I may have had scrapes at my feet and no shoes that looked decent, but I had learned a big lesson. It won’t be long now, you’ll see me strolling down the street with my brand new bike. I will be looking out for you. So we can ride together, with the perfect wind on our hair, and with the most shiniest pairs of shoes the world has ever seen. With bike rides for miles, Christina P.S. If you know someone who would benefit from Friday’s letter you can send them this link to subscribe: www.christinarasmussen.com/miab
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I had a dream that when we die; we return to experience the exact life again. We meet the same people, make the same mistakes, occupy the same story. I put it aside, reflecting that it was a strange dream. Further attaching to my belief that If we do return, we live a different life than the one we just had. I let it be. But a few days ago, I stumbled upon a book called Einstein Dreams by Alan Lightman. As soon as I opened to the first few pages, it was as if he was describing the dream I had. It was kind of eerie for me to read it. The novel was first published in 1992. It started out like this. “Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly. For the most part, people do not know they will live their lives over. In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word will be repeated precisely.” Sitting at the kitchen counter shaking my head, remembering my dream and re-reading the words in the novel. Do you suppose there is a world where we relive everything a million times? In the Einstein Dreams Novel, every chapter imagines a new conception of time. People existing in different worlds experiencing time in ways unfathomable to us. “There is a place where time stands still. Raindrops hang motionless in air. Pendulums of clocks float mid swing… As a traveler approaches this place from any direction, he moves more and more slowly. His heartbeats grow farther apart, his breathing slackens, his temperature drops, his thoughts diminish, until he reaches dead center and stops. For this is the center of time… The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey far from his lover, will never place himself in danger in self-sacrifice, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant time.” Are you breathing? I forgot to breathe for a few seconds when I was reading this paragraph. He then continues this unparalleled writing journey with these words. “Those not quite at dead center do indeed move, but at the pace of glaciers. A brush of the hair might take a year, a kiss might take a thousand. While a smile is returned, seasons pass in the outer world. While a child is hugged, bridges rise. While a goodbye is said, cities crumble and forgotten.” This is what happens when we remember someone we lost a long time ago. We freeze time. Even though that is not what Alan meant with his breathless book, this is the only thing we can do inside the linear time world we are living in. The only way to freeze an embrace is by remembering it. The only way to stop time is by stepping into it with your mind and climbing inside the memory. I can only imagine the liberties that people who have not visited the province of death make, about time standing still inside the realm of grief. Here is how time stands in mine. On July 21st, it will be 15 years since the father of my children and my first husband left our linear time world. As I approach July 21st each year, I go on a walk. The walk is invisible, and it happens simultaneously in everyday life. I may be doing the dishes, talking to a friend, writing to you, but the walk continues. I am wandering towards the last few days of his life and I freeze time. During the walk I see my house, the kids young. I see him ageless and not noticing I had arrived from the future. He smiles. He nods. 15 years have passed. I am weathered. I have a perpetual silence that seeks me everywhere. He is running around with the girls. He doesn’t know that in a few days, it will all be over. Nobody knows. Even though we were instructed to prepare. We never did. He stops at the grocery store during his last regular day. He does the mundane tasks that we perform when life appears as if it will go on endlessly. I now realize the air was a little thinner that day in the parking lot as we walked out to take that last ride home. My walk goes from there to him giving the kids a bath, and reading them a story in Danish. They sing together. Then I make it to the earlier years. It seems like I am running when I am there. It is a faster pace. But I can still remember everything. The birth of the girls. Our youth. The travels. The notion of assuming we could live forever. That is when I walk back to today, 15 years later. I didn’t know then how long the future was. How much life he was going to miss out on. Here time is linear, 15 years seems like a really long time, but for you, I expect for you it is like in Alan’s book. Time is experienced in every way, slow, frozen, circular, and you get to visit us whenever you want. For that, I am sure. When I take my walks to find you, I bet you visit with my future self while I visit with your past self. We meet there. Don’t we? In the intersection of time. One last thing before I go. The girls are doing well. You would be proud. Thank you for sending Eric. He is as you said he would be. With many more unseen walks ahead, Christina
Read MoreI have been changing things up in my life lately and I was reminded of the extreme discomfort change brings along with it. It feels like you are standing in the middle of a field with high winds coming at you from all directions. The winds are like loud voices screaming at you to get off the field. Expectations. Beliefs. Doubts. Old self. The Past. The Future. Everything is coming at you. You are scared you will blow away. And as you are holding on for dear life you wished you never made it to the field. No wonder change is so hard to choose. The moment you start changing things it brings in a storm to keep you inside. But did you notice something? Someone is missing from the wind blowers. Look at your feet. I’ll give you one guess. Who do you think is keeping you standing there, holding your feet in place in the midst of 75 mph wind? The present. The only reason why you even went to the field. You wanted to give yourself a happier present. But you see the past and the future are strong wind blowers and why the present always struggles. The past has done it for so long that it can create quite the hurricane. The future is temperamental and unpredictable, you never quite see it coming. The present is always younger than the past and too slow for the future. Now you see where the wind picks up speed, and why it feels impossible to stand on that field long enough so your present changes. But I am writing this letter to you today to remind you of something you may have forgotten. The present does have something the others don’t. It is the only real thing on that field of winds. The past is gone and the future hasn’t arrived yet. The longer you make it out there, the stronger the present becomes. The longer you stand inside the wind, the wind lessens. The present starts to grow in all directions, past and future. The past gets added to, and the future is being rewritten. By now the wind is more of a strong breeze which lets you enjoy the present a little more. I don’t know why it took me so long to take care of my today more than my tomorrow. Why I considered the past to be more important than the present. As you can imagine I have a lot of explaining to do, but my present and I have been having a lot of great conversations lately and I am making amends and righting all the wrongs. I hope you take a chance on that field of ghostly winds too, you and your present are stronger than you think. With a breeze, Christina
Read MoreEveryone says that love is the most important emotion of all. It has been documented forever. After all, literature and poetry over centuries captured the feeling of love. Like the most famous celebrity. The Queen of all emotions. But what if the most profound feeling of our existence is not love, but loss. And it never got the fame love did. It has been hidden. Shamed. Forbidden. Cut short. ‘They’ took away its words, and expression of it. We had to adjust our behavior to mimic its invisibility. We learned that communicating loss externally meant weakness. We were supposed to keep on working, caregiving, functioning regardless of what we felt internally. I believe this has been a type of human suffocation. It is easier to discuss and fight for an outer form of human suppression than demand validation for inner suffering that lasts longer than 6 months. It is nearly unheard of. It is hard to command a revolution for something that is invisible to the naked eye. You see, loss is not famous. But love, well love has been expressed a million times, in a million ways. If only loss had that same luxury. And I don’t just mean the loss of another person. I am bringing forth the loss that has not yet been defined, expressed and shown in all its parts, because it has been deleted from our rights by shaming us for ever expressing it. Even as I am writing this, I am thinking that maybe I should not be so dramatic. Maybe not everyone is feeling loss. Because even I have been brainwashed to believe that talking about it in the extremes, is an exaggeration. What a lie. What a false sense of existing that has been forced upon us. It is as if we get scratched every day and everyone around us is pretending not to see the scratch. Well, it is just a scratch right? Then every day, a new scratch happens. Some of the new scratches happen at the same location. After a while the scratch is a deep wound, but you can’t tell anyone because after all, it is a scratch. So we deny the wounds that did not start out deep. We deny them, because we are taught to believe that what we feel, what hurts, what looks like a deep wound is just a scratch. For some people, especially the ones who are really good at enduring the daily scratch, and even better at ignoring the becoming of the wound, one day they wake up preparing for another scratch and they don’t make it. The wound was so deep from the thousands of daily scratches that it took over them. Now imagine, if only that first day when the first scratch took place, someone taught us how to tend to it. Care for it. Talk about it. Imagine how things could have been. Since we can’t change the past. And my next book on this won’t be here until 2023, can you try and tend to your scratches daily? Can you witness and validate every seemingly insignificant moment that caused you to sigh. Made you lose sleep. And if you are not ready to share it with others, or there is no other to share it with. Write it down for yourself, and give yourself permission to look at your scratch as the big deal it can be. May your weekend be filled with a knowing that someone, somewhere knows how painful those scratches ended up being. And just like that, we start the journey to making loss as famous as love. After all, we know it better than we know anything else. Maybe even better than love. With scratches, Christina P.S. This week’s Dear Life Podcast was 9 minutes with just me, talking to you. I hope you listen here.
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