Life Is Short: Hang Love on the Line.
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I keep seeing, hearing, feeling messages about brevity. How life can change in an instant. How it can disappear, just like that.
It makes me want to take some people I know and love by the shoulders, shake them, and shout, “Don’t you get it? You’re missing the point!”
I didn’t need to leave to understand this. I didn’t need to remove myself from the situation. Yet I did so anyway, and in the small bit of still space I find myself immersed in now, I’m again re-learning something I caught a fleeting glimpse of, the time I thought I would die.
There are ways of speaking that don’t entail words. Many people around me told me I was being dramatic after I was attacked. They told me to toughen up, to get over it. They told me I was lucky and how fortunate that I’d gotten away. And in certain regards, they were right. Yet in the process of forcing myself to get over it, I shut down.
The entire world became scary. Most of all, myself. I was weak and vulnerable. I was an easy target. It was somehow my fault I was approached that night. It happened because of everything I was doing wrong.
It isn’t about the what, it’s about the how and why. Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” and there are some people who have made me feel just about awful or like I don’t matter at all, and I them, and we’re all running around blindly disappointing one another but mainly just ourselves.
I’m by no means perfect, and I should have given up trying to be so a long time ago, but the perfectionism continues to appear, like an illness rooted deep within my veins. I can’t help but want to make those around me happy. I can’t help but want to see the light in their eyes.
Because a light that flickers, baring down to the soul, is contagious. Around that kind of energy, I can find the tiniest, seemingly mundane details of everyday life entirely fascinating.
I love to photograph laundry on the line. It’s a minuscule, favorite artistic endeavor. The colors, the backgrounds, the patterns speak to me.
I wander around photographing the drying undergarments, towels, and everyday clothes of strangers, and one time a friend witnessed me doing so and poked fun, but not in a playful and loving sense, but rather like we were back in the grade school and my clothes weren’t cool enough for the bus ride home. We can grow older without growing up.
And then somebody else came along, months later, after I’d abandoned the project mostly from not remembering to continue. We were standing together on a staircase in an alley when I saw a line of clothes hanging on a nearby balcony and remembered. Describing to him my (now otherwise secret) passion, he lit up beside me and told me how cool, maybe I could make a collage.
And so now I’m back to photographing laundry on the line, and I’m happier than ever, and maybe I should have done it all along, but the fact is I didn’t. And I’m only telling you this story because wouldn’t you rather be that second person in someone else’s life?
Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we impact one another. We drive one another either down to the gutter or up into the clouds. We each have the ability, with a tiny or grand sweeping gesture or smile or touch of the hand to shape someone else’s day or week or month or year.
We can spark the remembrance of something that makes someone else light up; we can help one another to keep going when we’ve forgotten. We have the ability, person by person and moment by moment, to change the world around us.
We have the ability to promote healing and growth and encourage one another through love, or we can have the opposite effect, which I’m sadly familiar with and I think you are too.
In our interactions, we have the choice to be both strong and vulnerable simultaneously. We can choose to try to see ourselves as we really are, and then in the process, to see those around us. We can choose to lift one another just a small bit higher. But most of all, we can choose to love.
For me, life feels too short not to.
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Bretton Keating is a Yoga-fanatic, clean-eating junkie, artist-because-she-doesn’t-know-how-to-be-anything-else. She never sought this lifestyle, rather it found her; after years of attempting to be ‘normal’ she realized that simply doesn’t work. Now she strives every day to live from a place of authenticity, and aims to inspire others to do the same both through teaching Yoga and through her words. Bretton grew up immersed in stories. Through years of practicing Yoga and meditation, she has learned to ground back down to Earth, and realized that she has the power to live her own story. She is passionate about sharing her experience and the process of exploring this life, particularly in the realm of mind-body-spirit health, however she can. She writes because, quite simply, she knows that she must. For more of her musings on Yoga and life, check out her blog.
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