Good morning, DMV! It’s Wednesday, March 18.
Rest assured, dear readers, that I’m still doing yoga. Six days a week now that I have more time on my hands.
When I wrote Monday about my disoriented soul and mentioned I’d “canceled yoga,” many of you thought I had stopped yoga altogether. Goodness, no. I had canceled Sunday’s class to chill at home and bake a chocolate cake.
I’m actually training to be a yoga teacher and on Saturday taught my first free community class! (I thought it went well.) I’ve been practicing yoga for more than two decades. It helps me keep my head screwed on relatively straight. If one day I should say that I’ve canceled yoga — as in, for good — that would be a red-alert situation, friends. For now, it’s a key part of my life.
After my Monday newsletter, dozens of you wrote to me to share your experiences. A reader laid off from USAID last summer described the feeling of being discombobulated as “‘thinking through molasses,’ because it felt as though our brains had physically slowed down.”
How that resonates. I write about what I’m going through in part because I know this is a shared experience across the region — and beyond. Many of you have shared your stories with me. All we can do is try to support each other through it all, so that even if we feel like collapsing, unable to take another step, people are there to hold us up. That's what I hope to do for readers. That's what all of you do for me.
I had also written that as my body moved forward through my new disjointed routine, my soul couldn’t keep up. One reader flipped the concept and offered the idea of “slowing down and letting my soul catch up.” I’d never thought of it that way, though of course it makes sense.
You shared wisdom and sound advice, so I share it back to all of you in case you need it.
You deserve a big piece of that chocolate cake! (Yes, I do — I enjoyed it.)
Take the time to be a human being, not just a human doing.
You have a rare, golden opportunity to live life on your own terms for once, and that can be exciting.
You have what I now call a ”new normal,” and the fun part is that you can make that whatever you want, whenever you want.
Time and grace … there is a beautiful light at the end of this tunnel. You will find your way.
I leave you today with words that another reader shared with me, from the novel “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami:
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Dear readers: I love this newsletter and hope to make it my main gig, but I can only do that with your help. Please click on the button below and contribute to my “tip jar” so I can make this project sustainable. And thanks for reading me.
📰 News around the DMV
📚 Find good reads and new besties at local book clubs (Washington City Paper)
Readings and lit events to attend (Washington City Paper)
📽️ Don’t miss these film events and festivals (Washington City Paper)
🚀 Meetup
1 p.m. today: I’ll be speaking at a brown bag at at American University’s School of Communications, in the McKinley Building, room 101. Come say hello!
And planning ahead for Thursday, May 21: A reader invited me to volunteer with her at the Maryland Food Bank in Baltimore, so we set a date for that morning, 9-11:30 a.m., at the FoodWorks Community Kitchen. If you want to join us, please drop me a line, and I’ll tell you how to sign up.
📷 Your joy
(Pam Bell)
How fickle is spring. Pam Bell, 75, of Gore, Virginia, took this photo yesterday.
“St Patrick’s Day, at sunrise, I awoke to a covering of snow that fell overnight,” she wrote in her submission. “Wind and rain and tornado warnings had been forecast, not snow. Mother Nature’s March shenanigans.”
🙏🏼
