I fantasize about cookies.
The craving traces back to the movie this weekend.
I need a jolt of on-screen magic conjured the J.K. Rowling way and put on blushing velvet shoes to meander down sidewalks winking in twinkle lights.
I walk in the company of a sadness I cannot shake, and therefore, I stop trying to shake the sorrow out. I just shift my perspective into the present. Let the ache breathe along with me. And so I notice the world around me in its soft beauty, and let the ache and awe coexist.
I stroll by a bakery where a couple whips spoons into a sunshine perfection piece of lemon pie, and the passing image clicks a desire for sweets, and so by the time I snuggle into my theater seat, I lust to melt into a sugary indulgence. The movie menu specially concocted for the show beckons with scones and frosted lemon cookies, but the admission to the movie is my treat and try as I might, I cannot justify the cost of those cookies…so I just daydream about gooey decadence as I escape into the wizarding world of the 1920s.
A few days later, the hunger for cookies continues, but the visions of golden-blissed warm cookies falter in stirring the necessary ingredients of sheer determination and clear-headed steadiness to brave the grocery stores on the eve of Thanksgiving. My go-to cookie spot is off the beaten track from my scheduled to-dos, so I’ll have to last out the holiday to feast on what the soul of my stomach truly desires.
And as wishes of cookies tempt and tease, I go about my days with that certain flavor of heartbreak, and the heartbreak stills hurried questions, crystallizes them because the answering will be the healing.
So on a Tuesday night, with a glowing moon, I find myself restless with those questions, frustrated by the sadness, and drunkenly tired. I am careless in my movements and syrupy in my words, and this hazy state is undesired because I have improv rehearsal in a few hours.
I consider scampering off to retrieve the snickerdoodles steaming up my daydreams, but the scamper may cost me additional energy required to operate optimally for improv, and there’s also this phrase baking in my brain.
“We crave sweets when we feel that our life lacks sweetness.”
I’m not in the mood to eat my feelings, so I choose to drink them instead, and scurry to a nearby coffee shop to caffeinate clarity, or energize a step toward clarity.
I stumble into a coffee shop I frequent in the mornings and its evening existence is eerily still and strikingly vacant of the typical hectic and stylish stew of neighboring jet-setter clients and off-campus-venturing college students. I like the lone barista working. He complimented me once on an Eric Carle tee, and said I was the type of person he could see teaching and performing story-hour for kids. And for this rosy heart-swoon reason, I’ve been a bit sweet on him ever since.
Only, I cannot remember his name, and in my sleepy daze, I ask for it for once more, and then promptly call him another name when thanking him for my drink.
I take up writing residence at a prize table location often claimed by New York entrepreneurs in the early mornings. Here, in the desolate landscape of empty chairs, empty tables, I ruminate in my embarrassment and flip open my journal.
I slurp the floating froth from the London Fog, my new chosen beverage, and scatter spontaneous words across a blank page. And in the randomness of writing whatever zig-zags across my mind and down my arm, I realize that I am exactly where I was a year ago.
I quit the stability of a position to pursue a whisper. The whisper tugs the heart, calls on courage to leap into uncertainty.
I always stay too long. In relationships, in jobs, in situations that no longer serve my well-being. I’ve stayed too long again and at the end of what is an active letting go, I feel a deflated exhaustion that makes me want to curl up and take refuge in the marrow of my bones.
This time last year I left a job, purchased a faux fur coat and went to Kentucky to reflect, clarify, and reset for 2018.
And in this past year, I lived on the edge of my comfort with improv, with forging my own path with teaching yoga aligned to service, and yet, I also spent the most of this year literally racing around the city, strategizing my schedule to fit and finesse a social life, performance, instructing. The running drained me, and the alternative work schedule did not grant the space to stay clear, as I often quipped it did, because I didn’t safeguard spaciousness. I too easily relinquished my time, and didn’t question the relinquishment; perhaps, I feared the answers the pause would naturally pull to the surface.
Or I fear not knowing the right wording for the questions to ask.
So, I free write.
Focus flowing forward.
Presence over proving.
Activate imagination.
Significance over success.
The last line echoes from an interview with Viola Davis, who speaks with such spirited authority on authenticity and emotional intelligence. An actress who unravels and reveals raw, resilient, heartbreakingly lovable humanity.
Her interview leaves me hungry, too. A craving for the performing arts, because the arts will alchemize this present sadness into service, into connection, into belonging.
I write focus, focus, focus over into the notebook because that along with the words clarity and discernment settle the restlessness, satisfy the questions, for now, and recycle the sorrow into action.
And in writing about focus, I realize I can focus here, in this nighttime nest of coffee shop emptiness.
The soundtrack playing dissipates any sense of desolateness and stimulates an aliveness. I catch the barista while he’s tidying up the tables and compliment him on his DJ skill, and the name hiccup from earlier fades as we talk bands and Thanksgiving plans.
The conversation, the London fog (which I believe contains sugar, and that’s utterly fine with me), and the writing boosts the pace of my evening walk to improv practice.
I love being on this college campus, and as I briskly navigate pathways and pause by busy roads, I pass my former self, and she’s younger and all-knowing, and in the knowing sensed she’d be coming here on her own, and there’s a reminder of that whisper, that whisper followed and continues to be followed to a classroom turned stage in the mathematics building.
I think of her and take comfort in the cycles I’ve already been through and how they shape and inform my next step into uncertainty.
I hear the playful flirtation of a couple ahead of me, and I instantly adore them because they are comparing books they’ve read and plays, and they are so innocent in their bantering. They sweeten my evening.
And by the time I reach improv, most of the London fog has been happily sipped, and I’m still a little tired, and I still crave cookies, and I’m also elated by meandering under the moon, by this circle of creatives, and how I can share all of this in a warm-up exercise and be heard and loved in my messy realness. I receive the sweetness.