It’s all a flow, Mama.
We keep the flow going and we’re good.
And so we drove back wiping tears from our face, knowing that whatever will come next will be full of moments of grace and gratitude.
This past weekend we helped Inez (our daughter) move to Orlando to continue her education at UCF. We are so proud of her and all she has accomplished so far. This move was something we all had worked for and supported. We are beyond excited to learn from her as she expands her educational horizons in this new place.
As parents, we also mourn a bit. We know that the routines we had become so comfortable with and cherished, the coming home and sharing coffee, meals together, working out and practicing yoga, watching Netflix, and conversations on the fly will no longer be as accessible.
More than these losses, I think what we mourn the most is the fact that we are noticing that time has passed and there’s no recovery of that time. I can recall vividly Inez as a toddler camping for the first time, her pink Barbie car, her bookmaking stage, oh so many loving moments.
There’s a certain tender vulnerability in knowing that we will never return to how things were. We understand that when she comes home, all of us will be different. This does not mean that there will be less of the love that has bound us even before she was conceived, but that because we will all have grown, we no longer will be the same people, even if we were to share the same house again.
For many this sounds overly dramatic, but, in fact, every day that passes we change as we grow, we change as we no longer have that day that just passed by, we die a little as we live.
Being aware of these big and small shifts and embracing them fully is an artful flow, what in yoga we call a vinyasa, a purposeful sequencing of poses that invite us to a spacious awareness of ourselves as more than the sum of our thoughts, feelings, or body.
In our day to day life, we sometimes fail to notice the shifts because to do so often involves some sort of vulnerable softness too often expressed in tears, but again, when we consciously welcome the awareness, we may notice that these spaces of vulnerability are also spaces of openness between one movement and the next, and if we are aware enough, we notice that every moment of tender letting go can also be a beautiful recognition that as physical forms, we are here only for a short time, none of us stay put, all is shifting, all is lovingly moving as Life itself.
