Noticing & Naming: A Monthly Practice

Living in the fog, finding small rituals, and friends who become home

December held some days that felt like weeks and some weeks that simply disappeared. There was a lot out of my control last month, a fair amount of heaviness lingering at the edges. I got sick on Christmas Eve, so I had to skip out on the festivities for a couple of days and watched too many cheesy Christmas movies instead. We packed in condensed family time and saw friends when we could, giving our nephews far too much sugar and saying some really hard goodbyes. December didn’t look like I’d imagined, but it was a practice of doing what you can and taking it hour by hour.

Here are a handful of observations from last month as well as a few questions to help you notice and name what’s happening in your life.

Five Things I Noticed

I’m trying to pay attention to the world around me and to the details of my days. Sometimes these observations may lead to bigger realizations, but other times, the act of noticing is enough. Here are five things I noticed in December:

1. A leaf stuck in the window with a tiny upside-down heart cut out of it.

2. How good a sunny day felt after days and days of cloud cover.

3. The way my friends’ one-year-old says “snack”—with the “aaack” drawn out and without showing her teeth. It’s our new favorite way to say the word.

4. When I was sick over Christmas, I left the blinds on our big windows open well into the dark evenings. It felt like some kind of connection to the outside world—they could see our Christmas tree, and I could see the headlights of cars and the warm glow of houses from my spot on the couch.

5. It was very foggy here Christmas week, and it felt like an apt metaphor: How do we live well when everything is shrouded in gray and we can only see what’s right in front of us?

   

Two Things I Named

I have a loud internal life, and naming what’s going on on the inside helps to quiet things down. When we can put thoughts and emotions into words, fear begins to lose its power, next steps come into focus, and we realize we’re not actually alone. Here are two things I named last month:

1. I’m craving small rituals.

Recently I’ve found myself drawn toward rituals, small rhythms I can turn to again and again. For example, I’ve been reading some Puritan prayers and a book of daily liturgies in the mornings,¹ and I’ve adopted a breath prayer for moments of anxiety.² I also got a new planner³ that encourages creating four mini rituals in your day: a morning ritual, a workday startup ritual, a workday shutdown ritual, and an evening ritual. I’m intrigued, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with what those could look like for me. In the middle of a lot of uncertainty, having some structure, some scaffolding that I don’t have to constantly recreate, feels helpful right now. It’s giving me a few fixed points in the middle of all that’s fluid.

2. Friends can become home.

And a part of our home moved (very far) away last month. These are the kind of friends who give you the code to their front door so you can let yourself in any time. The ones who say, Come over for the game today! We’ll make wings. The ones who host the bridal shower and then the bachelor party, the more the merrier. Losing that proximity is a deep loss; it changes the landscape of our celebrations and our ordinary days alike. The change is still setting in for me, but I’m taking comfort in the fact that even though these dear friends no longer live seven minutes away, I know that we’ll still have a home waiting for us each time we pick up the phone or book a plane ticket.

Questions for Your Practice

1. What rituals do you currently have, if any? Where could adding some built-in structure bring more peace or enjoyment to your day?

2. What’s your natural reaction when you can only see what’s right in front of you? If you tend to jump into action, what would it look like to pause first? If you tend to get paralyzed, what’s one small thing you can do that’s within your control?

3. Who feels like home to you? Why? How can you extend that sense of home to someone else?

My view on Christmas night with the windows open and the pup close.

Words That Resonated

In an effort to give us more language for our lives, here are two quotes that stuck with me last month:

“I have gone looking for one thing and found another, not something rare and celestial and beyond my control, but something that was always within my power to find. The act of seeking attuned my senses and primed my mind to make associations. I was open to magic, and I found some, although not the magic I was looking for. That’s what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else. An insight that surprises you. A connection that you would never have made. A new perspective.” —Katherine May, Enchantment

“I’m starting to think this is the way of authentic resilience: not checking out of your life, or even powering through, but practicing the learned skill of staying in the tension, where deeper muscles are activated. It takes a certain kind of soul stamina to accept that joy and sorrow belong to each other just as the salt belongs to the sea.” —Stephanie Duncan Smith, Even After Everything

Thanks for being here. If you have a small ritual that’s working for you right now, I’d love to hear about it. Feel free to drop it in the comments.

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1. I’ve been reading The Valley of Vision and Every Moment Holy, Volume 1.

2. A breath prayer is a contemplative practice in which you repeat phrases along with your inhale and exhale. It’s a simple way to embody the truth of what you’re saying, and it also helps to calm your nervous system as you take deep, intentional breaths. Recently I’ve adopted one from Stephanie Duncan Smith’s book Even After Everything that goes like this:

Inhale: I AM

Exhale: With Us

Think: The I AM is with us. Smith explains it this way: “‘I AM,’ the name God revealed of God-self. ‘With Us,’ the name of God-born-human, a promise of presence in every moment.”

3. These four rituals are from the Full Focus Wellness Planner that I’m trying out this quarter.