december + january 2021: what I’m learning and loving

I am lumping together December and January’s lists because I got sucked into my end-of-the-year reflecting and, honestly, the insurrection and its lack of aftermath. So you get a double dose of what I’m learning and loving lately…

What I’m loving

Friday hikes. A few years ago, we started going on a hike before church. We coined it our “church before church hike” because getting out in nature is church in and of itself. But then the kids started sleeping in later, and sleeping in on a Sunday morning is a very beautiful thing. So the family hikes became less predictable. At the end of the year, Grant and I both said that we wanted to recover that rhythm, so we decided on hiking directly after school on Fridays. I don’t want to speak too soon because we are only a month in, but it is such a great way to end the work/school week and start the weekend. I’m hoping it sticks.

Winter sunshine. One benefit of living seasonally is appreciating the seasonality of things – Indiana strawberries for just a few weeks in June, the hard work of spring after the rest of winter, and the glimpses of sunshine during dreary Indiana winters. Because I know the winter sunshine is fleeting, I find myself enjoying it all the more while it’s around.

Masterpiece on PBS. Grant and I haven’t met a Masterpiece show we didn’t love. For family movie night, we’ve been watching the new All Creatures Great and Small – which is so great, and we are all loving.

After loving Peaky Blinders, several people recommended we watch Boardwalk Empire. We gave it two episodes and were not impressed. We realized that we prefer the British sensibility: less in-your-face sex scenes, less gratuitous violence, more character-building. So we told ourselves to just start watching more of the Masterpiece backlog since, so far, we’re batting a thousand. We zipped through Miss Scarlet and the Duke, which was fun and funny. In the past, we’ve loved Poldark, Downton, The Durrells, and Selfridge. Look at this great list of options we have to work through!

Bonus tip: if you donate to your local NPR or PBS station (ours is $60 a year, but I think it varies depending on your station), you get access to the PBS Passport, allowing you to stream all of the content whenever and wherever you want. We have always donated to our NPR station to support public broadcasting anyway, so getting streaming was a very nice side benefit.

Maeve’s basketball team. I volunteered to coach Maeve’s basketball team with a friend whose daughter is also on the team this season, but honestly, I was planning on Grant running the practices and me just being there for moral support or at the games when Grant couldn’t be there because he coaches Jasper’s travel basketball team. But, because of Covid, they would only allow us two moms to attend practices and games. We are having so much fun. The girls are super scrappy, have great attitudes, and are really interested in the game. What started out as something stressful has turned into one of my favorite things from this winter.

These jammies. My mom put some Christmasy version of these in my stocking, and they are my favorite jammies ever. I am typically an old-tshirt and sweats pajama personality, but I love how soft these are and somehow they just make me feel like I’m starting off the day on the right foot when I wake up. I’ve already bought another set and have Goodwilled the worst of my pajama drawer.

What I am learning

How much I took for granted my sense of taste and smell. I’m three months on the other side of having Covid, and I still don’t fully have my sense of taste and smell back. Before Covid, I had a really good sense of smell. So much so that Grant would get annoyed with me because I would smell something that bothered me that he couldn’t smell. I really miss it and, if it comes back, I hope I won’t ever take it for granted again.

Child development science. Without naming names, one of our children has been particularly sensitive and moody lately, in a way that feels different, if that makes sense. Grant and I were talking about how to deal with it one night, and I googled the symptoms – only to find out that what we were seeing was totally normal for their age. Googling about physical/mental health stuff isn’t always a great idea, but I was really grateful for people who study this stuff for a living that 1) helped me realize what was going on was totally normal 2) gave us lots of great tips on how best to handle and 3) helped remind me that we’re collectively learning more about ourselves all the time. 

John Muir on sauntering versus hiking. I came across this story this month that I used for a yin class. Supposedly John Muir disliked the word “hiking” because it implied that the destination was more important than the journey. When asked about hiking, he said:

I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.

This, of course, begs the question of whether you’re a hiker or a saunterer through life. Hikers are worried about status, money, climbing ladders, and achievement. Saunterers are present, grateful, full of joy and reverence.

Continuing the analogy, I wonder too if there are seasons for hiking and seasons for sauntering. Or perhaps we’re perpetually doing a little of both.

How small a thing can make a difference. We all know this to be true, of course, but for whatever reason, I have witnessed either for myself or a friend or loved one, how small of a thing can make such a drastic difference in someone’s day. Of course, this is true, and maybe even moreso, for the ways in which we criticize, judge, or react negatively toward people, but here I’m focusing on the small ways in which we build each other up. Some examples from the last months that come to mind: friends enthusiastically cheering on another friend dipping her toes back into dating after divorce, a teammate telling Jasper “great game,” a stranger telling me they found something valuable about my writing or teaching, a text complimenting our kids’ kindness, a manager noticing an employee’s dedication and telling them so. We have so much power to create a better world for those around us – often just by putting into words or action what we already say to ourselves. Why not do more of it?

Laundry lessons. Laundry is not my favorite chore. I just hate how it’s always there. Sometime in the last few months, I decided to stop being so angsty about how it’s never really done and just be content with doing it in smaller batches instead of trying to get on top of it all in one chunk of time. One of Grant’s mantras to me and the kids is “just chip away” – don’t get overwhelmed about the whole project or to do list item, just start chipping away at it. Somehow it took me a long time to apply this philosophy to laundry, but my acceptance of laundry always being there, coupled with Grant’s mantra, has helped me to just do the thing. I have a free 20 minutes? Get a load in the washer, and fold the load in the dryer. These small wins with laundry have also, of course, shown me that the same is true for nearly everything I dread doing: starting is always the hardest part, progress is more important than perfection. Just. Chip. Away.

What are YOU learning and loving these later days of winter?