I wrote this last year but I still love the feeling so I’m going to make it my first blog. Welcome to 2019!
I was reflecting about the fact that very recently I hugely messed up with something and three friends offered their help and ‘had my back’ (a wonderful way of saying!). I was falling and they picked me up and went ‘there you go’. And as I looked back I realized the last few weeks since the new year have been quite interesting.
A lot happened that seemed to me all part of the same story. A story of friendship, trust and faith.
I trusted a friend I didn’t know too well and discovered a whole new point of view to look at myself and from myself to look at the world which I had never considered before. I did that with a group of strangers who are now my friends. I reviewed two friends’ new businesses, recommended two people who were in my team on LinkedIn. Organized some drinks for no specific reason, made chocolate cakes for a dinner party. Went back to the dancefloor after a long time (too long!).
I introduced people I used to work with with people I work with now. Met a friend I hadn’t seen in years and it seemed no time had passed. Got sent the contact details of someone who could do something for me without even asking.
The team I lead at work has been delivering the best creative work we have been doing together and we are doing so by working closing together despite locations, roles and reporting lines. The work feels so interesting. It has more energy. People are happier.
One evening I was at dinner with my long time Italian friends in London and for a second it felt like we were back to the Alps 20 years ago. Another evening I had a vulnerable conversation with a guy I almost didn’t know. I listened to a friend who is falling in love and to another who is separating.
The more I think about it the more examples come to mind. I have been trying to put a name to this overall experience (the mind can’t stop the catalogue of the world!).
…it definitely feels alive, it has a beat to it, it’s like a dance where you don’t know next steps and they just come natural. It feels like being a bit of the blue in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. A part of something. A something that is changing and not frighteningly so.
Then the other day I read this:
“All living beings are oscillators. We vibrate. Amoeba or human, we pulse, move rhythmically, change rhythmically; we keep time. You can see it in the amoeba under the microscope, vibrating in frequencies on the atomic, the molecular, the subcellular, and the cellular levels. That constant, delicate, complex throbbing is the process of life itself made visible.” —The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin, page 195
The word throbbing caught my attention, I looked it up.
This is it : throbbing!
Being part of a world of connections feels like I can feel my own heart throb. It’s pure aliveness in the shape of the relations which shape us.
PS a good friend told me the word ‘throbbing’ has different meanings in sexual contexts. I’m not going to amend it as a celebration of the joys of speaking English as a second language and all the funny situations I put myself in with a pitch of naiveté.
Photo Credit: Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. Copyright: Governorate of Vatican City State – Directorate of the Vatican Museums.
Creative Grace 