Learning to Enjoy the Ebb

For so long I didn’t like the ebb, it felt like a letdown, it felt like that moment that just happened might be less. I’d learned this after many wonderful moments and some of those are only meant to ever happen once. The ebb after those can feel like a loss. Though I hate to admit it, though I wish I were above it, this comes from the lack mentality. The “this will never happen again” thought process. Is this as good as it gets? I think you need a lot of data to make that kind of determination. I think it requires a lot of research and time and attention. I also think that sometimes we dismiss things because they are not easy. Because they require work. Everything is work, even play is work for a child, it is the process of BE-ing…so maybe learn to take a new view on work. I am working on that, every day, and some days I am not very good at it.

These past few days, the ebb feels like the calm after the storm… I have a clarity this time, so very clear that I can hear myself think. I have craved silence for so long and so much after a recent car accident. I think I was waiting to hear myself, having ignored me for so long and spilling everything out in poems, in a novel that remains unpublished, in flash fictions pieces, in flash nonfiction. I like to do things on the flash, it works well with who I am, but my goal with everything has been to go deeper. I have done the deepest interpersonal work on myself over the last year and a half. Before that there was 10 years of trying to extricate myself from abuse, from the past, from feeling that I was trapped with no way out.

Life ebbs and flows, we have moments of expansion and retraction. Each has their purpose, but sometimes we don’t appreciate one or the other. It depends on what we are going through, the lessons, the experiences…how the moments taste and touch and feel. Many times we don’t appreciate the ebb, perhaps there is less excitement, perhaps we drop down from that high. For those negative or difficult times, though, the ebb is the reprieve. For either good or bad…which is just a matter of perception anyway, the ebb is a good time to reflect. How do you feel? Do those things still move you so deeply? Pay attention, they are the important thing, the things that you can’t get out of your mind. They are your work, they are what is left after the fall, they are the morning after, the hard lessons, the bliss lessons. Use your ebb to catapult you into the next phase of your life. Learn the lessons and grow.

4 thoughts on “Learning to Enjoy the Ebb”

  1. The ebb is a time when we can take advantage of what some friends call “Turtle Time”, time to slow, reflect if possible, heal if we can let it in. I don’t always find it easy to float in, I try my best and mostly it’s enough.

Leave a Reply to Miriam Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *