The slump, the silence, and the way back

A few weeks ago I went to a memorial service for a childhood friend. She was 57. A heart attack while on vacation, the kind of news that stops you cold because it's so sudden, so final, so impossible to make sense of. Her parents and my parents have been friends since college, so I took my mom and dad with me, two hours each way, on a day when they're already navigating more than enough of their own.

The church was full. She had been a teacher, and former students came from everywhere. Colleagues spoke. People laughed and cried in equal measure, the way you do at the service of someone who was genuinely, quietly loved.

At some point during the service, an administrator from her school district stood up and read from Dr. Seuss. Not a children's book chosen for sentimentality. A real passage, chosen with intention, about the bumps and hang-ups and slumps that find all of us eventually. About the unmarked streets where you don't know whether to turn left or right. About the fact that un-slumping yourself, when you land there, is not easily done.

I don't remember exactly what he said before he read it. I just remember the feeling of hearing those words in that room, surrounded by people who loved her, and thinking: yes. That's it. That's exactly where I've been.

The thing about a slump is that it doesn't always announce itself clearly. Sometimes it looks like exhaustion. Sometimes it looks like going through the motions. Sometimes it looks like lying in bed at night scrolling your phone because your brain won't quiet down and you don't have the energy to do anything about it. And one of the cruelest things about being in a slump is that the very things that would help, the walk, the massage, the hour of quiet, the appointment you keep almost booking, feel impossibly far away.

We get hung up. We get left in the lurch. And then we sit there in the lurch wondering why we can't just get ourselves out of it.

But here's what I took from that passage, and from that room full of people who showed up to honor a woman who had touched their lives: nobody gets through without the slumps. Not one person. The bumps and hang-ups are not evidence that something has gone wrong with you. They are part of the journey. They are, in fact, written into the journey from the beginning.

And you are not stuck in them. Even when it feels that way. Even when the streets aren't marked and the windows are mostly dark and you can't quite figure out which way to turn.

August's theme is disconnect to reconnect, and I've been thinking about what that really means. Not just putting your phone down. Not just taking a vacation. But creating enough quiet that the thing that needs to land actually has room to land. The Dr. Seuss passage cut through in that memorial service because I was sitting still, without my to-do list, without my phone, without the noise of running a business and caring for my parents and managing everything that needs to be managed. I was just there. Present. And something true got in.

That's what an hour on the massage table

does. That's what the VAT table does. That's what any real, intentional quiet creates, not emptiness, but space. Space for the thing you need to hear to actually reach you.

If you're in a slump right now, and I suspect some of you are, because we all get there, I'm not going to promise you that one session will un-slump you. It won't. Un-slumping yourself is not easily done. But it starts somewhere. Usually somewhere small and quiet. Usually somewhere you give yourself permission to stop, just for an hour, and let something in.

Come in. We'll hold the space. You bring whatever you're carrying.

Jen