You ever have those moments of pure joy? When life seems to contain endless possibilities and you're young and on top of the world, where no one can witness your actual skipping down the road and contagious grinning at nothing in particular?
That was me the other day. I had the day off and I decided to take myself on a little date up to Mount Diablo. Sounded innocent enough.
I drove up the winding mountain roads, passing the occasional biker, with nothing but the open road ahead of me. When I got to a proper spot, I took the route off the beaten path to the top and was lost to the wilderness.
Call it the uplifting music playing in my ears, or the Vitamin D soaking into this girl's awaiting skin, but being out there by myself at that moment took me to the highest highs, literally.
I couldn't contain my excitement and joy and man, it flew out of me, the mountain being the only one witness to my happy dance (unless there were other hikers who saw this grooving girl and her manic grinning, in which case, #sorrynotsorry).
I told my mom about it later and she reminded me of the tendency I often fall prey to: feeling deeply.
I've been this way all my life. I don't exactly know what living a balanced life feels like. For years, I admitted that my weakness was sensitivity, being over emotional and feeling to extremes. To this day, it remains so.
As Rupi Kaur so appropriately puts how I often feel,
when I am sad
I don't cry I pour
when I am happy
I don't smile I glow
when I am angry
I don't yell I burn
the good thing about feeling in extremes is
when love I give them wings
but perhaps that isn't
such a good thing cause
they always tend to leave
and you should see me
when my heart is broken
I don't grieve
I shatter
There have been many occasions during this move of mine where I've been confronted by the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows. One day, I'm crying about my future and confessing to my journal my worries over my personal failure and then the next day, I get a job offer and am dancing on top of a mountain all by myself, whole, complete, and belonging completely to myself.
What I'm finding though is that the highs don't cancel out the lows. That as amazing and glorious as those highs feel, they don't eliminate the fact that within minutes, I can go from 100-0 real quick, and that that transition period from high to low or low to high throws me off quite a bit.
I'm not apologizing for how I feel, or saying that feeling deeply is wrong and should be corrected. I've learned that it's an essential part of who I am and that in times like these when I'm fully aware of my transition into feeling deeply, I need to balance how I feel.
Not balance the times when I feel really good to the times when I feel really bad, but to find a happy middle. A balance between the two. That way, I don't fall prey to the depth of my emotions to the point that I have trouble coming down or going up.
It made particular sense to me on this day at Diablo. As I looked around, I saw proof of how important balance is to life, to nature, and how the earth operates to sustain human life. The balance of gravity that allows us to walk, to run, to remain rooted to the ground, and the balance of the breathing in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. It works together to sustain human life and it reminded me to do the same for myself.
Oh it is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so very deeply...
