Something About A Hashtag: #fires

This morning in the Hashtag Micro Retreat I chose #fires.

I wrote through some complex feelings, relived a recent conversation about resiliency, and ended up speculating about my grandparents and great-grandparents and how much better equipped I am now to understand what they went through: Fleeing pogroms, successive emigrations in search of safety and survival, loss of racial identity, fighting in world wars, surviving on the home front, sending sons and husbands to fight in world wars, losing sons in world wars, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, watching the rise of fascism around the world …

I had not expected to go anywhere near anything like that.

But that’s what focused writing on one thing that affects you deeply in the moment can do.

It can pull you back out into a space of wider perspective, deepen your empathy, and return you to a place of hope or perhaps peace of mind. I’d rather face the weekend with a relatively clean emotional plate than the doom and dread I woke up with this morning. I’m grateful I get to do just that.

I really encourage you to join The Hashtag Micro Retreat on Friday mornings if you can.

It’s worth sitting down to the page

even if it feels too early in the day to dive into anything real and you just want to chew up the pen with your frustration.

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