Sometimes our world shrinks in an instant. A relative says something disparaging about how we parent. Our partner turns to another screen while we’re sharing our heart. Our child shatters a glass of blueberry juice on our new woolen carpet.
Our bellies tighten, our chests constrict, our minds whirr with the incessant voices of trickster telling us to fight our corner.
We have closed the doors and shuttered the windows and trapped ourselves inside a smaller home. It’s so small, it can only house a sliver of life–a slice of anger, a morcel of misery, a dollop of depression. Yet inside the walls of this domain, there is nothing else, it’s our whole world now.
Sequestered here we forget what love feels like. We forget what family means to us. We forget how large the world is and how small our momentary troubles are.
Learn how to return to the larger world, a world that’s big enough for our hurts and frustrations as well as our joys and love. Open the doors, clear the cobwebs, throw open the shutters. Let the light in.