Nox Amicus

At 6:32am on June 25th, the Moon was New again. While I may be posting this a few days after the fact, the theme has been on my mind for well over a week now.

The focus for the last cycle was Joy—and in that post, I contrasted my desire for joy with my persistent sense of anxiety. Through the course of the month, I recognized that while my perception of this is uniquely my own, the conceptual challenges are not. If there was a plot to a movie contrasting Joy and anxiety, there must be a lot of people this touches.

What is unique, though, are the circumstances that keep me sitting in this space.

This came into focus for me during last week’s heatwave. I was trying to balance humidity, temperature, and air pressure in an elegant dance of airflow to keep the space cool. I failed — miserably. I was so desperate for a solution that I began brute-forcing every metric: fans on high, cooling on maximum. But it was having the opposite effect. When I stepped back and really watched what I had wrought, I saw the problem. The heat was subtle and stealthy, but I was unleashing chaos to remediate it.

It wasn’t until I stopped that I noticed that one fan wasn’t doing what I needed at all. I moved it two feet, set the speed to low, and suddenly everything clicked.

Slow down. Don’t overthink the problem. Nudge the subtle changes first. Be patient.

Patience is a funny thing — like airflow, it’s subtle. Where are the timey-wimey lines between wasting time, lying in wait, patiently waiting, and evolving?

None of us want to waste time. Not many want to be Aaron Burr. And patience, unchecked, can drift into inertia. But waiting for the right moment and leaning into it — not with the reflexivity of lying in wait, but with the effortless flow of evolving — that’s where growth happens.

Over the past few months, I’ve increasingly realized that I have been Waiting for much of my life. That recognition brought the theme for this cycle.

I realized that I would save things, I would delay things, I would inhibit things because “it wasn’t time yet.” It was the pack-rat trap of saying “I may need this someday,” only to realize someday is today and I really don’t need that.

The same is true for meeting a moment. In the last post, I reflected on Australia six years ago, and right now I am eight years removed from the trip to Greece. Those moments arrived and I was ready for them. But have I always been ready for all the moments and never gave myself permission to see it?

There’s a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands” that’s always haunted me:

You spend your life waiting / for a moment that just don’t come

I always felt like I was waiting on the moment — as if it were the moment’s responsibility to come to me.

But I always glossed over the next line:

Well, don’t waste your time waiting.

A week or so ago, I was meditating, and a phrase came into my mind that struck like lightning: “Here is now”.

It reframed everything. I didn’t need to keep saving things for some future “someday.” It reframed the meeting of the moments of Greece and Sydney, my fraught relationship with time, and the tentative nature of my steps along the path of self-advocacy. It’s always been time. I have always been here.

So this cycle, I want to look closely at my relationship with Waiting. What moments have I delayed out of fear or anxiety? Which have I correctly deferred because I wasn’t quite evolved enough to make them successful? Some bits of evolution are too convoluted to just throw caution to the wind — but maybe I’m more ready for some things than I give myself credit for.

The companion song is again one I’m singing to myself — not in anger or regret, but in compassion. And maybe just a little impatience.

It’s all I can do, to keep waiting for you

At 11:02pm on May 26th, the Moon was New again. Leading up to that moon, I was convinced what the theme was going to be! I prepared for it; I researched it – but a moment from a few days before was stuck in my brain and wouldn’t dislodge.

In the last post on Apologies, I spoke about the origins of the word Sorry being from the base of the noun “sore.” Its synonyms in this case include ‘pained’ and ‘distressed.’ On reflection, this brought me back to a diagnosis from a psychologist 20 years ago – sure, I had generalized anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders – but I also had what amounted to dysphoria. This was explained as the antonym of euphoria; I am predisposed to see the glass as half-empty. Whether this is neurochemical or conditioned as a result of trauma, we don’t know – and honestly, I don’t know how much it matters.

I have done a lot of work in twenty years to see the brighter side, to not get mired in the everything – but sometimes that amounts to nothing more than masking, where I don’t believe it, but I am in “fake it ’til you make it” mode. This is especially true in times where I am particularly stressed – times when I need to be “on” and reliable. It’s times like this that the anxiety simply takes over.

The trigger question that flipped the script on the focus for this post was an honest query related to a potential birthday gift: “What would make you happy?”

Back in November, I wrote a post on Definition, wondering how I define myself. In that post I spoke about the movie “Inside Out 2” and how the primary conflict in the movie was between Joy and Anxiety. As I had been recounting the movie at the time, a most trusted soul asked where my brain escaped to during the moments where Anxiety is in control, and I related that it was in Sydney. In that post in November, I said, “There was a completeness in Sydney where there were no contingencies or expectations – I was free to walk the streets with no agenda at all – as myself, not a customized version of me created for someone else.” It is in these moments that I find Joy.

I went through a period of time in my life where I would not use the word Happy when referencing myself. I believed it was bad luck – or some twisted kind of nirvana – where the moment you say you’re there, you get kicked out. Happy was anathema to me. I’m working on softening that stance – but for the sake of honoring that discomfort, the theme for this cycle is Joy.

This past weekend I watched the season finale of Doctor Who. While the Doctor was expressing fear about an upcoming event, one of their prior incarnations advised: “Don’t go in fear, go with that lovely smile”. This preceded the Doctor being comforted by a character from the last Christmas special – Joy.

We change, we grow, and we become. Through all of the lives we live and faces we put on, we are still and always us. But those subsequent iterations are informed by the spirit with which we enter them. The day is just the day – it can be anything. But if we can find a way, any way, to approach it with Joy instead of with anxiety, it simply makes for a better day for everyone!

I should have been riddled with anxiety when I went to Sydney – but I wasn’t, at all. I embraced it and lived it, and found great Joy in all of it. I know that feeling, I am capable of that feeling, and I believe that I don’t have to fly halfway around the world to recapture it.

There was a song that was the impetus for that trip, “The Door Into Summer” by the Monkees. On that trip I actually had a chance to tell Mike Nesmith (who sang it) that the second verse is what brought me all that way to meet him. Today, as we are looking at the threshold of another summer in a few weeks, I want to reflect on the Joy found in that trip, and do my best to greet each day welcoming whatever Joys, large or small, can be presented. Anxiety can rest, Joy can breathe in the day.