The Stuff of Possibility

Those religious and non-religious, alike, generally agree on the Ecclesiastical dictate, “For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven (NRSV Chapter 3).”

Welcome to the inaugural post of Routine Interrupted, its timing synchronistically aligned with the vernal equinox—the onset of spring—the season of new birth.

“It hasn’t always been that way,” my oldest daughter began. “The first calendar was based on the lunar year, with the new year starting in mid March when we enter the vernal equinox.”

I love it when I learn new things from my children, when we switch places and they become the teacher. I should have known the daughter schooling me on the history of the calendar would become an astrology aficionado. Call it a stretch, but, when she was four, she became obsessed with the Karl Lagerfeld perfume, Sun Moon Stars. It wasn’t the actual fragrance that captured her attention although she begged to be spritzed on the regular. Instead, it was the rounded blue bottle with a sun, moon and stars relief covering its face. She would hold the cobalt muse lovingly and gaze, transfixed, into the crystalline galaxy. There it was—the heavens in her hands. Sometimes I’d catch her, free of adult inhibition, spinning in circles with the emblematic atomizer raised to the overhead light. I could nearly see what I imagined she saw: celestial elements being flung into space. My cousin was the owner of this object of my daughter’s imagination, and, we both took to using “Sun Moon and Stars,” discretely and interchangeably, with my little girl’s name. “Sun Moon and Stars wants a snack,” I’d say, for example. “Sun Moon and Stars is in the bath,” my cousin might advise.

That astrology lesson, in December of last year, began as I talked to my daughter about Seasonal Affective Disorder. Consistent with its indicative acronym, SAD is a form of depression that returns year after year, around the same time of year—most often, with onset in late fall when days become shorter and darker. I have struggled with symptoms of SAD since I was a child but only fairly recently learned it is a bone fide disorder. In the conversation with my eldest, I complained about the futility of making new year’s resolutions in the middle of SAD, about how difficult it is to come up with goals when you’re depressed, and how unrealistic it is to try to load up new undertakings when all you really want to do is lie in bed. “Sun Moon and Stars,” now in her thirties, empathized and pointed to the astrological new year as a better time for intention setting, rather than attempting resolutions during a season that demands stillness.

“We wake from winter slumber when it starts to warm up,” she explained. “We all do it. Not just plants and animals. And people are primed for new growth in the spring because, like all living things, we are part of the natural world.”

Since then, I’ve taken this planetary perspective under serious consideration and opened myself to the science of astrology. And, please know, this is a complete turnabout for me. Before my daughter’s tutelage, and, even though I’d long been a woman of reason, I was locked in by an early Christian education where I gathered that lending credibility to the zodiac was, pretty much, worshiping a false god. Never mind that earth-centered religions predate Christianity by millions of years, my intellectual capacity and scientific curiosity had been insufficient to dismantle this limiting belief. Ultimately, it was a growing humility and corollary increased ability to set ego aside that freed me. No longer hostage to the hubris of certainty and loyalty to ideas instilled by others, I was finally able to acknowledge the tenuous nature of the legacy belief that prevented me from taking seriously the scientific truths my daughter had been offering for years.

So, on the heels of the vernal equinox (it was on Tuesday, March 20^th this year) you are reading my first Routine Interrupted post. With this launch I am interrupting one of my own routines because, as R&B duo McFadden & Whitehead said in in Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now—their 1979 signature hit—I “refuse to be held down any more.” While most who know me will attest to my courage, strength and determination, I confess that fear has danced in the background of my inner life for as far back as I can remember. Among many other problematic things, fear has prevented me from going public with my biggest dreams and pursuing them with consistency. I am very clear that my confession is not just necessary for the interruption of my fear routine, but it’s also right for this inaugural post. That’s because my transparency is the first step in gaining your confidence in my relatedness, openness, intellectual flexibility, and willingness to be wrong. The first step in establishing an essential trust between reader and writer.

So, let me be explicit. My fears are the regular ones. The voice in my head often whispers, “Can you really pull this thing off? Are you even believable? What will ‘they’ think about you and your aspirations? What if you fall short? What if you fail?”  I’ve done enough book learning and had enough therapy to know that my fears are not exceptional. They are common and simply part of the human condition. Still, until acknowledged, openly and out loud, fear can paralyze and hold us prisoner. This has certainly been the case for me, and, now, with clarity of the costs, I am compelled to interrupt my surrender-to-fear routine. And while I can trace my earliest feelings of inadequacy—the seed of my fear—to particular people, moments and experiences, I know the cure is not in the origin story. Instead, relief can only be found in the healthy distance I put between my Self and those disabling contributors.

And so it is. I am stepping through the threshold of the vernal equinox with solid intentions and expectations of growth and harvest. And when proverbial storms rise, I will bend and resist, fall and rise, and look to those toiling in the fields beside me for fellowship, solace and inspiration. We will tackle the questions together and bask in the glow of respective growth under the same sun. Despite our distinctions, we are, essentially, the same. Ask William Sanford—popularly known as Bill Nye, the science guy—or astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson: whether earthly or of the heavens, we all are made of the same stuff. We are stardust, elements of unlimited potential, the stuff of possibility.

lau

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