Category Archives: On My Mind

On My Mind

A Dream

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About ten years ago, I went through a difficult period in which I couldn’t see a future; I couldn’t dream. I tried to imagine one, five, ten years into the distance and saw blackness, absence, nothing. It wasn’t that bad things were happening, but that I couldn’t see anything at all.

I tried the same with friends of mine and could see a future for each one of them. I concluded that nothing was wrong with my imagination, but that something was wrong with my own thoughts about myself.

This is why I will always tell people that therapy changed my life. Go see a therapist – they are good people.

One of the things on my mind back then was one day, eventually, starting a family. Ten years has gone by faster than I ever would have thought and when I consider myself and two friends around me at that time, I can only throw back my head and laugh.

At the time, all of us were unsuccessfully dating. Now, we are engaged, partnered, married. None of us were ready for the children we all hoped would be somewhere in the future. Now, we are all preparing for babies who will arrive this year.

Ten years ago, I saw these futures for my friends though I couldn’t see one for myself. Today, I am holding hands with these friends across time and space; the future couldn’t look more different.

Madeira, Portugal – October 2025
On My Mind

Protected

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A friend recently sent me a bracelet in the mail – no card, no note. Instead, the gift was accompanied by an explanatory text introducing the the bracelet as one for expectant mothers and informing me that the three stones on a thin cord were rose quartz and hematite. According to the text, rose quartz is meant to provide protection and emotional support for mother and child, while hematite is one of the oldest protective stones and believed to help maintain balance in body, spirit, and soul.

I felt a peace spreading through my body when I held the bracelet in my hands. It’s the type of jewelry that I’d like to wear without taking off, but I’ve decided to remove it at night for the sake of longevity. For many years I wore red string bracelets, believed by cultures around the world to protect the wearer from harm. In the tradition that I know, a loved one clasps the bracelet around the wearer’s left wrist where it should remain until it falls off on its own. I often found mine tangled in my sheets upon waking, and I’d like to prevent my newest protective bracelet from meeting the same fate.

I admit to being somewhat superstitious in certain contexts, having a baby being one of them, as well as fully persuaded by the existence of unexplained spiritual forces in the universe. I hadn’t known that I was holding any negative emotions until I put on the rose quartz and hematite bracelet and felt lighter, safer, more confident. I am not one to shy away from incorporeal practices of the ages.

My partner and I joke about how we found each other in the world – mostly by travelling through enough countries in the same year that we eventually landed in the same place. We are both happy to accept a spiritual explanation for that.

That a friend from halfway around the world sent me just thing that I didn’t know I needed has, to my way of thinking, similar spiritual overtones).

And any force of nature that people have believed in for thousands of years, especially at a time when I draw strength from all of evolutionary history, is a powerful one indeed.

Chiang Mai, Thailand – January 2018
On My Mind

Slow Down

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People keep telling us to enjoy this time, this holiday season, the two weeks we have off with no plans. “It’ll be different next year,” they say. “And for the next many years,” they say.

We know it will. We’re ready for different, and we’re looking forward to it.

But I am also very focused on what is happening right now because I know this is the end of a time in which our worries are pretty simple and pretty solvable. That’s not to say that there aren’t stressful times, upsetting times, uncertain times – of course there are, because that’s what living means. But now is certainly a time of fewer variables; our family consists of one fewer human now than there will be in a matter of weeks!

So I’m enjoying sleeping in, spending half a day on a puzzle, going for a spontaneous walk in the sunshine, waking without a plan and letting the day proceed as it will. There are things to do, of course, and things I want to get done (nearly all of which relate to baby planning), but rather than rushing into all of them at once, which I am prone to do, I’m trying to do things one at a time. I’m just trying to slow down.

Because this is the time where I can. I can indulge in not having to think too hard or do too much, and I am trying to enjoy this feeling because I know everything is going to change. And as I can be pretty tightly wound and all too efficient for my own good, slowing down is somewhat of a challenge for me.

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions because I firmly believe that the time to change something is the time when one recognizes there’s a change to be made. Over the course of the last few months, I’ve made a very considerable effort to slow down because I know that’s something that doesn’t come easily to me. I would like my child to be a little more relaxed than I am, and I thought it would be helpful for us both to just take a step back. Approach the to-do list with the confident calm of someone who knows it will get done. Do one thing and then the next thing rather than trying to fit all the things into one moment.

As I’m writing this, the Chanukah candles are burning. Sometimes it’s nice to just sit back at watch.

Weimar, Germany – February 2024