jealousy

You know how sometimes you are finally getting to the point in your life when you're starting to be rather good at a Thing, or getting ready to be rather good at a Thing, and it's going along swimmingly and you're really quite proud, but then someone pops into your life who is, woah, already so good at the Thing and is effortless and confident about the Thing for which you were only starting to feel like bragging about yourself?
That's happening to me.
I'm pretty good at doling out this particular advice: I say, if there are people who are more talented than you or more driven than you or who make choices you wouldn't be able or wouldn't WANT to make yourself, the best way to handle it is not to squeak out the 'but I...' or the 'hmm...' and instead say, 'Oh how INteresting of them!' You know, don't take other peoples choices/gifts/lacks personally. I've given that advice to more than two people in my life, maybe three or four! But I'm not doing so well at consistently taking it myself.
Man, jealousy. Man.

permission for feeling

I've had a lot of drama in me the past few weeks. The necessary release of a long, heart-spilling walk in the rain with my most understanding-of-me friend, the audaciousness of the mimosa tree in the front of our yard. Pride in produce from my little square of a garden, and the zinnias blooming at the back. Vicarious drama: drama in sports, drama in my brother-in-law's love life, drama in a presentation I didn't have to give, drama in administration wanting to throw us a bone because we're not getting what we really want. Ice cream and ladder golf.
The stomach swooping realization that my grandfather was dying, and the hug from a purple haired pixie girl I don't know well after I said so out loud. The aching sense of loss when my grandfather did die, and walking in the twilit woods with S, eating wild blackberries and watching spiders spin webs and deer run on ahead of us, and talking about what it means to be losing another generation, to be losing the man himself, although for years he wasn't fully the man himself, about his laugh. I just twist up with losing more of my links to the past, and it's so very limiting, in our narrow little world, to lose one more. Plans change. I handle telling my boss about it badly.
Sometimes I worry I cry too easily and that crying means I don't handle things well or don't keep an eye on silver linings. But I think I actually do keep an eye on silver linings and on the macro and on my micro, I just let myself drift along inside of these things when I'm sad, and when I'm around others who are experiencing a loss, I vibrate with empathy, and let my heart beat however it wants. I don't mind getting stuck sometimes in the mire of messy tears and aching chests. I don't know if I feel better afterward than if I'd stiff upper lipped through, but I don't feel worse. I don't think I need to keep scolding myself for feeling.
There's a lot coming up in two states to grieve and celebrate life and remembering and then in a third state to spend the remainder of a heady week in simple communion with the family at large. We're shrinking and we're definitely growing, and both ends sting, and that's ok.