11 | April | 2012 | A Thousand Shades of Gray

What do you wish to jump into?

It’s interesting that Jamie’s picture is her jumping in a puddle in the rain. It’s raining in Fort Collins today, drizzly and dark and depressing. This is what the wishing landscape looks like here today:

It’s the kind of day when a soft puff of breath isn’t going to do it. Those wishes aren’t coming off, aren’t being made without a little energy and force. There will be work involved with this wishing.

How interesting, considering the clearest, strongest, loudest answer I have for this prompt, “What do you wish to jump into?” is that I wish to jump into writing my book.

And then, what comes right after reinforces the realization I’m having that I am a Jill of All Trades. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking that your dream, your passion, your calling, has to be just one thing, and I was okay with that, since being a writer was my dream and it felt so huge, big enough to fill a whole life. But, what I am beginning to understand is my dream involves more than just that, even as central as the writing is to the rest. It includes yoga, meditation, coaching, therapy, art, mindfulness, teaching, mentoring, hiking, running, music, blogging, web design, dogs, relationships, vulnerability, bravery, silliness, curiosity, eating healthy, self-care, self-love, etc.

And yet I can distill the whole thing down into a single calling: helping people remember, rediscover, be mindful of and manifest their basic goodness. I wish to jump into that. Plunge, dive, leap, vault, cannonball, belly flop, jump into that.

I had no idea this was going to be my word for the letter “h.” In fact, when I brainstormed a list of words the other day, my “h” word was “happy.” Such a bright, sunny, hopeful, feel good word. So what happened?

Last night, I watched the movie “Sarah’s Key,” (Netflix added it their streaming options, so you can watch it on demand). It made a better movie than it did a book, most likely because the amazing Kristin Scott Thomas played the lead. She has the ability to play a character haunted by longing in a way no one else can match.

Then I woke up to a gray, rainy day, still thinking about it, about them, all those people lost, all that suffering and brutality. You might not know this about me, but I am a bit obsessed with the Holocaust, and have been ever since I first read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

When she made her first entry in her diary, Anne was four years older than when I first read it, but there was something about Anne’s voice that seemed to come from inside my own head. She was so much like me. She loved books and movies; had one older sibling; wanted to grow up and marry and have children and to be an actress or a writer; she was independent and stubborn, but also sensitive; she felt like no one who knew her really knew her, that no one saw her true self. She wrote in her diary because “I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.”

I identified with Anne’s isolation and her hope for the future. I fell in love with her, mourned her death as if I’d lost a real friend. I felt the sad recognition that for every person like Anne, full of hope and possibility, there was another full of pain and anger, someone who had the potential to get in the way, to wreck and ruin that possibility.

I’ve read this book many times over the years. Every time, I brace myself for the disappointment that I am sure will come, because I can’t believe the actual book could possibly match my memory of it. I expect that it won’t be nearly as moving or meaningful—but it is, every time. And every time, my heart breaks again—that we as humans can be both so wonderful and so horrible.