I want to tell you about something that happened yesterday. It’s not big, but I think it’s important.

My thirteen-year-old daughter agreed to spend an hour decorating the house for Christmas with me. (This isn’t the important thing, though it was unexpected, bless her sweet eighth-grader heart.)

I was elated. ELATED. It felt like lead-filled ping-pong balls of JOY and EXUBERANCE were ricocheting around in my body.

If that doesn’t sound pleasant to you, we are in agreement! It was not pleasant! It felt joyful and festive, and it also felt—literally—insane. Extremely out of whack. Dysregulated.

And then, the important thing: my body and brain told me to get quiet and meditate.

David Rose rolling his eyes and saying "'K"

I KNOW. You know how skeptical I’ve been about the importance of contemplation in the life of a Table person. Ten minutes’ daily white-girl meditation will somehow increase the justice and equity in the world?! 'K.

But this summer I formed a contemplation habit, and it has actually been working??? So yesterday I listened; I got quiet and still; I let my brain settle.

For context: this hasn't been an especially bad or good or weird week, but it has been a holiday week, and another wild week in the landscape of the 2020s. In just the last seven days (this list is intentionally exhausting! Literary device!), I have spent four nights with my family of origin / helped my adult-migrant ESL students and their kids cram garbage bags with warm clothes in our church’s free store / learned that the former US president plans, if reelected, to round up these migrant families and herd them into detention camps / sat on our squashy couch with my daughter’s head on my shoulder, watching Brooke Shields ride horses with Westley / read a small handful of articles about the Israel–Gaza ceasefire and release of hostages and prisoners / heard on the radio that, globally, we’re somehow actually increasing our carbon emissions / played Mousetrap with my niece and nephew, who tried so hard to be patient with each other and the damn mice. Oh, and I’ve put out little work fires; driven thirteen hours with a puppy, two kids, and a grandparent-sized mountain of Christmas gifts; cooked dinners for people who are never not hungry; the usual.

When I let my body get quiet yesterday, it turned out: it wasn’t just elation crashing around in there. There were a lot of heavy projectiles: joy and dread and pride and bliss and rage and hope and gratitude and sadness and relief, each given extra topspin by my ever-present hypervigilance.

At this time of year, in this world, there’s so much input…and, like a teenager, I need it to settle before I can do anything with it.

Stick with me. Psychologist and teen-parenting guru Lisa Damour recently reminded me (and her other zillion podcast listeners desperate for insight into teenagers): The adolescent brain is in the active process of remodeling itself, simplest parts first. A major component of teenagers’ teenager-ness is that they’re trying to process adult-sized emotions with a kid-sized frontal lobe not yet suited to the task. Lisa describes the situation like a jar of glitter in water: a teenager feels a big emotion, which shakes the jar; a storm of glitter occludes everything; the teenager has to wait for the glitter to settle before the frontal lobe can come online and make any sense of it.

I’m an adult, but sometimes this brain-to-input imbalance seems deeply familiar. Here I am, trying to process Planet Earth-sized (and holiday-sized) emotions with one mere human-sized frontal lobe. And no disrespect to teenagers, but the stuff clouding my brain isn’t glitter: it’s those lead-filled ping-pong balls. The grief of the world and the joys of the most wonderful time of year, crashing around.

So: contemplation.

What happened in that ten minutes of meditation yesterday was best described as a melting. Somehow, as those little missiles settled, they also broke down and liquefied. I DO NOT KNOW HOW THIS WORKS. But Sarah Blondin says that contemplation can tenderize big emotions, even pain—break them down into their component parts, which are (1) love and (2) the desire for good.

This feels right to me.

I don’t want to have to make a choice: either tune out for my own sanity (just ignore the news! It’s Christmas!) or be internally pummeled insensate by the Enormous Feelings of December 2023. I don’t care for false binaries. I want to stand in the world solidly and see it squarely; I don't want to hide.

For that, I need to be grounded and well fed. And I'm learning that, in contemplation, once the projectiles have settled and liquefied, those big emotions feel less like chaos and more like fuel. Less like a hailstorm, more like lava.

I recommend it.

How about you? How are you dealing with all of the everything right now?

xoxo