Next stop: Utrecht
Last fall, I met an extraordinary group of ladies. We spent the weekend together talking about life and loss and this crazy, messy, journey of grief. The hard things. The brokenness. But also the strength and the surprisingly beautiful things that have been birthed from the ashes. One of the ladies shared a poem with us titled, Welcome to Holland. It wasn’t about the grief that follows the death of a child, but it did convey the message of embracing life even when things don’t turn out like we’d imagined. And it did so by telling the story of packing for a trip to Italy, but realizing your plane had arrived in Holland instead.
The planning for my sabbatical was already in progress when she shared the poem, and I loved that I’d being traveling to both Holland and Italy. Both planned. Both beautiful. And both with an opportunity for living fully even in the face of the unexpected. The reality is we face that choice everyday. Will we show up each day and make the most of it in the midst of disappointments, hurts, obstacles, and uncertainties? The bigger question for me is if I’ll allow myself to feel all the things that make us human. I tend to stuff, reframe, or dissociate from my true feelings… as if my true feelings are bad. It’s how I learned to survive early in life. I’m working to change that. And it’s messy. But it’s also hopeful to think I can choose a different way.
As I entered a shop the other day, I said hello to the shopkeeper and asked the routine question, “How are you?” His response: “I’m amazing!” “Wow, I need to up my game,” I bantered in return. He chuckled and confessed that he says that because if he conveys any hint of a mediocre or challenging day, others might accept it as an invitation to share their woes. Perhaps it’s universal that we’re conditioned to put on a happy face and it’s motivated by myriad reasons. I’m exploring that while I’m here.
For now, we’ve moved on from Holland to the city of Utrecht. It’s the oldest city in the Netherlands and fourth largest. Average age of its residents is 36 years old due to a population of 50,000 students. Another fun fact is that the train station here has an underground parking garage with space for 13,000 bikes!
