The Old Voice Warning Me

When I like a thing, I tend to...really like it. Almost to the exclusion of everything else. When I was in my Hamilton (the musical, not the city) phase, I read Chernow's book about Hamilton (that was SO LONG), I memorized the whole soundtrack, I followed every Twitter thread and video and anything I could find that was remotely related. I listened to literally almost nothing else for months.

Then...at some point, I stopped. I was done. My brain wandered off to something else, and I haven't really listened to the soundtrack since. I still like it, I want to see the play eventually, but when I had the chance to join people in the random lottery style lineup for tickets for the eventual Toronto debut of it....I didn't really bother. (Saved me a bunch of money, I suppose, I heard tickets weren't cheap.) It's no longer a hyperfocus.

This is how I like things. I get into them, with my whole self for a while, then I'm done. I've done it with numerous craft projects (cross-stitch, crochet, among others), languages (Russian, mostly), I do it with stage plays (Hamilton, RENT, In the Heights (that one's still an active focus)).

When I found the Baha'i Faith...I kinda fell in with both feet. There are a few days around when I declared where I didn't sleep a lot, I was just kinda floating in a lot of reading and a lot of wondering and some very patient friends who let me ask them a lot of questions. I have read (and continue to read) as many books about the Faith I can get my hands on. (Yes, I did read Lights of Guidance cover to cover. It was actually pretty interesting. I learned a lot.)

I hyperfocused, hard. I wanted to know everything all at once. I still do, although I've kinda realized there's more than I'll ever know, or fully understand and that's okay. I read a lot and I tried to be everywhere and do everything and I reached a point right after the Bicentenary in October where my body was like "okay, enough, breathe a little".

So...I've been breathing a little. I still love Baha'u'llah and His message with my whole heart, I still go to Feast when I can and I usually have at least one Baha'i adjacent book in my book rotation (right now, it's Creating a New Mind, by Paul Lample). But maybe I don't go to every single devotional that's within reasonable transit distance, maybe I let myself read a few more romance novels before tackling more Adib Taherzadeh.

It's hard not to feel guilty. I keep hearing the voice in the back of my head that tells me that maybe this is just another hyperfocus. Every time I forget my obligatory prayer, or I can't make it to Feast, or I don't go to someone's devotional because I have something else I'm doing, I worry. I worry I'm just going to some day just...drift out of this.

It's kinda scary to admit that, out loud. I talk about how the Faith has changed my life (and oh my gosh, it really has, but that's another story for another day), how I love my community, how I like that I have a way to participate within my own capacity for service with the newsletter and the social media bits. But I don't talk so much about how I am scared my brain is just going to decide I'm done, someday.

I know people will tell me that if it's important, it will stay. The way I've kept friendships alive and my marriage alive and my cat alive - they're important, beyond hyperfocus. The things that are part of the very core of me, those don't go away. I'd love to believe that my Faith is in there too, in the core of me. But I don't know yet. In the grand scheme of my life, I've been doing this Baha'i stuff for....maybe 3 percent of my entire existence?

I know the answer is to just keep on keeping on, the way I do. To keep finding ways to serve the Cause, to keep connecting with my local reality and my friends and my life, and to keep integrating the Baha'i concepts into my everything, as I've been doing. But I thought it might be good to also talk about being scared. I don't think we do that enough, admit we're scared sometimes. We all want to be good people doing good things in good ways that don't let people down.

So hi. I'm Ash, I'm not always good at this, and sometimes I get scared. Sit with me, if you're scared. We don't gotta even talk about it, we can just be scared together, and then we can maybe keep walking, lanterns held high, pushing back the dark.

Could I Rise Above the Flood

The world lately seems so angry and frustrated. Heck, I'm angry and frustrated too. It's hard not to be, not to feel powerless when there's things you need that seem to be constantly dancing just out of reach, when it feels like you try so hard and so long and nothing comes of it. It's hard not to feel like Charlie Brown and the football, a little. 

I've been working through one of the Junior Youth Empowerment Program (JYEP for short) books with a dear friend of mine lately - it's called Breezes of Confirmation, and it basically talks about the idea of putting in effort, and God confirming those efforts (framed mostly around growing up and figuring out what sort of career to follow, or what role you will play in your family and neighbourhood). It's aimed at 11-14 year olds, and honestly, I love it a lot. It takes this big scary idea of "how do I know I am on the right path", and makes it approachable.

So, in the midst of all this anger and frustration and not getting what you think you need, how do you sit with it? How do you stop from constantly feeling like every job rejection, every broken promise, every "we should hang out" that never actually results in seeing your friends, every time you try to do something nice and it falls flat, is like Lucy yanked that darn football away again?

Maybe you don't. Maybe you feel SUPER MAD about it for a bit, because, well, feelings are feelings, and it's okay to feel them. Maybe, if you're me, you ask your husband to go for a walk with you even though it's dark because you just want to get out of the house, out of the place that reminds you things aren't where you want them to be just yet. (We're moving in a few weeks, so things feel weirdly stuck and in-between right now.)

But then what? You have your anger squid moment, you get your ice cream, then what? How do you keep going? How do you know when God's saying "hey yo it's all good just wait a few" or "hey yes you are on the right path, it's just longer than you think" or "oh maybe you should turn left here at this stop sign"? 

A lot of it comes down to trust. We are reminded to "[n]ever lose thy trust in God. Be thou ever hopeful, for the bounties of God never cease to flow upon man. If viewed from one perspective they seem to decrease, but from another they are full and complete. Man is under all conditions immersed in a sea of God’s blessings."(Abdu’l Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, p. 205.) And sure, it's nice to know we're immersed in that sea, but sometimes those blessings are hard for us to see. It's hard to have trust, but isn't that what faith is all about?

We gotta start with putting in the effort. If we don't give God a place to start, He's got nothing to work with. It'd be nice if He just dropped things in our laps, but as Abdu'l-Baha reminds us, "Make thou an effort that thou mayest take thy place under the sun and receive an abundant share of its dazzling light." If we just sit at home in the dark with the blinds closed...God can shine all the light on us that He can possibly manage, but we'll never see it. It's like...God wants to rain good things down on us, but we've got to be ready. As a friend put it the other day, if we're just standing on our porch in a raincoat and boots with an umbrella up, the rain can come down forever, and we'll never feel it. We'll be dry, but trees don't really grow well in deserts.

Heck, Baha'u'llah himself reminds us of this, in one of the Hidden Words - "O SON OF BEING! Love Me, that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee. Know this, O servant." So, we do our best. We live and love and try and wait and maybe sometimes we do have a temper tantrum or ice cream for dinner or whatever it is that we do when we are just our most vibrating anger squid full of feelings, but God sees us, He sees us trying, and one of these days, we'll kick that football so fast and so hard it'll bounce into the next neighbourhood.