Reorienting & Regrounding…Plus a Little Bit about Mrs. Pollifax

Okay, so the boy has been dropped at college, seems to be happy there so far, and we have been home and back to work for two days. May I say, I highly recommend setting up a vacation, so you have a short work week and then your next weekend. Definitely helps the transtion!

And now I guess we’re at the point where my husband and I step back into a pattern that has a new, subtle shift in it, and we…see where it goes. There’s a tiny piece of me that is listing all the new changes I could try out, but I’m resisting the pull for now. Life has felt compressed for a few months now–all about making sure X and Y happened by a certain time, a certain day. I’m ready to let things expand into a long view for a bit and just watch to see what space I do have and what I might like to do with it. I’m going to restart with a chiropractor and see if we can do something about the low-grade but chronic ouches in my hip and back, but other than that I’ve made a semi-commitment to myself to stick with the existing for a while. I’ve got my job, which I’m still enjoying a lot, and I’ve got yoga–which has, honestly, been off the schedule a bit too much the past few weeks. I’ve got a picture book in the query queue with a few agents, and I’ve got this first draft of my MG novel to get written–I’m somewhere about halfway through, I think.

I came home to a stack of books that didn’t quite grab me, and I found myself going back to my Mrs. Pollifax mysteries for a reread. I don’t think it’s an accident that I’ve turned to those. If you haven’t read them, I highly recommend the first half dozen or so (not sure what happened to the series after that, but it didn’t keep the same magic for me). They’re fun, light, well-written mysteries, but they’re more than that. Dorothy Gilman did a brilliant job of painting a character who truly gets what living in the moment means, in a way I think Gilman herself must have. From the page in The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax where she finds herself standing at the edge of a roof–possibly a second away from stepping off, possibly not–and then takes action to change the life that has brought her to this moment, Mrs. Pollifax is someone who looks closely at who and where she is. She constantly makes choices that–for her–represent incredible risk but also offer the chance for huge growth. I know, it’s typical of me that I would have a fictional hero, but, hey, they’re where you find them, right? Anyway, reading the books gives my brain a rest from all the changes that have been happening and reminds me again that change is a much better place than stagnation. They also remind me that there is a quiet place in the middle of change, almost always, for recentering and taking a clear look at your own “now.”

So, me and Mrs. Pollifax, that’s what we’re doing.