Most days of the week, between 11 and 11:30, you will find me sitting at our kitchen table eating a veggie omelet and drinking coffee. I make the omelet with green pepper, mushrooms, spinach, and rosemary roasted sweet potatoes, plus lots of Happy Cow butter. I drink the coffee from an old Tandem mug. I am hungry and happy to eat. Sometimes I am checking Story’s math problems while I eat. Sometimes I am talking to TJ while we both eat together. And on my very lucky days, no one is around and I can read my book.
Today I did not eat an omelet. Instead, I drank coffee all morning, and then met a friend for lunch at Aryana, the Afghan restaurant in downtown Greenville. My friend and I figured out today that the last time we went there together was last January. I was happy to go again. I don’t exactly know what I ate (and that is not usually the way I roll), but I just know it was good. Good to eat. Good to catch up with a good friend. Good to get out.
And now it is good to be back home. Good to be writing again. And always, always good to be thinking about words. The words in my mind this past week have come from conversations with another good friend about a book she is reading, which I read twice last year because I loved it so much.
There’s a chapter in the book that is called “Welcome to Holland” because it includes the well-known essay by the same name written in 1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. If you haven’t read the essay before, it is short and great and could change your life. That’s how I felt when I read it. That’s also how I felt when I read this whole book by Lori Gottlieb. It’s not short, but it is great and could change your life.
I have been thinking about what Holland is for me and about how there are many ways of saying the same true things. Also, no matter how many times I hear or read the same thing (or different versions of the same thing), I can’t receive the wisdom of the words until it is my time to receive them. There’s a Buddhist saying I love that says, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”
Another way of saying what the “Welcome to Holland” essay says is on this card I’ve kept for years. I had to really access the files of my brain this morning to remember where I had put the card, but I am so happy I found it.
A third way to speak the very same truth is from these circled lines of a poem I memorized a few years ago.
It makes me happy to have multiple teachers of the same lesson. And lookie there, I did not even include one Annie quote about acceptance and letting go, but you know I could go on and on about that. I won’t do it today. I just want to name these three ideas as one and the same, and I want to do my best to live into these words.
I am coming to understand that the crucial piece for letting my life be changed by truths like the ones above is anchored in another truth Lori Gottlieb writes elsewhere in her book, “We grow in connection with others.” I love how the nuanced stories my friends share with me about their lives continue to help me unravel, untangle, and understand my own story better. I love the interconnectedness of all things. What some days looks like my regular old omelet, and some days takes a detour to eat at Aryana (or Tandem), and then always circles back to stay in Holland are giving me a life that is both full of desire and easy to please. Oh, how I want to be this kind of person!
