For Rebs and Liz, who visited me from New York last week and filled my week with so much joy. You didn’t get to do my weekend rituals with me, but since I spoke of them frequently, I spent the weekend capturing them for you. I can’t wait for you to visit again.
It’s another one of those Saturday mornings.
I wrote about it once before. The sky is blue. The streets are occupied but relaxed. The market was bustling. I feel so at home there.
And by there, I really mean here. In Amsterdam.
As I biked away from the market, my woven tote in my bike basket, full of flowers and homemade jam and pesto and fruit—mandarin oranges… big, beautiful, mandarin oranges… two because the volunteer at the farmers market wouldn’t let me walk away with just one—I couldn’t help but think about how this feels.
Easy.
Like pulling the right thread that unfurls the whole ball of yarn.
But this ease didn’t come easily.
The first step was choosing to see all the good and beauty around me between, and even during, life’s struggles. This meant creating a mental landscape that gravitates toward beauty, the product of hundreds of decisions made over several years. The more I position life’s beauty center stage, the more beautiful life gets.
The second step–this is what occurred on my bike ride home from the market–was accepting that I do not need to sheepishly deny the mental landscape I’ve worked so hard to build.
I’ve struggled with this for a while. I felt guilty for all the blessings in my life and the blissful gratitude I felt when reflecting on it all. Because our cultural default seems to be to focus on what isn’t going right in our lives—there is bonding in the commiseration—everybody seems to be in a constant state of struggle. To feel a sense of ease feels weird. Maybe even wrong. And forget about admitting it. To share all the good feels like bragging.
But denying my own ease-full living doesn’t make anybody else’s life easier or more beautiful. If anything, it does the opposite: it feeds a toxic cycle of focusing on what is not going right.
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For whatever reason, on that bike ride, life invited me to let down the dam and allow all the beauty to swarm me. To flow into and out of me. It was a kind of bone-deep satisfaction I’ve rarely, if ever, felt before.
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I wish this for everybody.
I wish that, at some point, you dedicate the time and energy to build yourself a set of stairs, so you can climb life’s mountains with greater ease.
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There are whispers of spring everywhere.
Little flowers popping out of the dirt in the park. Tons of yellows and purples. Some are so fragrant, your nose announces them if your eyes are too occupied. I recognize the daffodils. I hope to know the names of the rest soon too.
We took the cushions for our roof furniture out of the box where they’ve been locked since we moved in in October. The sun was so warm and delicious, I comfortably sat up there in just a long sleeve shirt.
Bars are setting up their outdoor tables along the canals where I’ve never seen tables placed before.
People are lounging with their morning coffee at tables outside the small standalone coffee kiosk I’ve passed on my way to my favorite bakery and cheese shop most Sundays since October.
My neighbor who lives on the first floor placed a bench outside their door, between their newly potted flowers.
The gelato shops are thawing, their doors opening for the first time since the fall.
Flies are starting to take advantage of our open windows and abundant Saturday farmers market hauls.
The winter sale signs decorating every shop’s windows are coming down in favor of “new spring arrivals.”
The birds are chirping from dawn to dusk.
The sun is waking up with me, if not before me.
The volume of tourists is growing and their presence can be felt earlier and earlier in the day, with lines to the famous fries, cookies, and sandwich snaking across streets and around corners. (There is so much of Amsterdam to see! There are far better cookies!)
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I planted the seeds of ease in fall and winter.
& now, it seems, they’re blooming.
Sending you love & light,
Syd