"Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news"

on moving & trying to find your ground

I’m officially on the other side of this cross-country move. I’m sitting in my new writing space in our new town just south of Los Angeles. I’m forcing myself to write but it feels like my writing muscles have been replaced with wet plaster. How did I ever write before? 

Which reminds me of standing in the bathroom last week staring at our toilet articles, thinking, How do I make a bathroom again? In our old bathroom, everything had a place. Some of it may have looked nonsensical to an outside observer, but to me, it made sense. 

Nothing makes much sense here yet. 

Before I woke up my kids for school this morning, I read a few pages of When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön. My morning reading & journaling time is the one ritual I have not let go of throughout the past few months of change. Sometimes I only read half a page, but it’s as necessary as washing my face and brushing my teeth. 

In the introduction, Chödrön quotes her teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who says: 

“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.” 

Nothing feels further from the truth. 

I think what he means by chaos is groundlessness—when the rug has been pulled out from under us and we’re left in a wide open space without our usual handholds. I appreciate this sentiment in the abstract, but when I’m drenched in sweat trying to figure out how to wedge my medications into the bathroom drawer when I could have found them sleepwalking in my air-conditioned house in Pittsburgh, chaos doesn’t feel “extremely good.” It feels pretty awful. 

Chödrön writes, “Anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness. That’s when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.”

“Completely unnerving and completely tender” is what life often feels like for me. On the outside, I can seem cool as a cucumber. On the inside, I’m like Chris Farley in Tommy Boy with every new thing I do. 

anybody else relate?

And, here I am now, looking out the one tiny window in my writing space in our garage onto the side of the neighbor’s house with its Spanish style roof and vibrant flowering trees—orange, yellow, and purple blossoms. The air is cool because it’s still early in the day, but soon it will be hot. LA hot, not Pittsburgh hot. I leave the door open for more air.

The view from my writing desk in Pittsburgh was through a skylight in the attic. It faced the gabled roof of the neighbor’s house. When I was thinking or looking for the right word, I used to watch birds taking small steps along the edge. The sky was sometimes grey, sometimes bright, sometimes in between. 

Here in LA, it’s just about always golden bright. Sometimes, I like the perpetual glow. Sometimes, I miss waking up and wondering what the weather will be. 

The other night, I stood in line at a new parent event at my kids’ school next to a guy from Chicago who’s also a recent transplant, and we were talking about how different LA is from Chicago and Pittsburgh. “It still doesn’t feel real here to me,” he said. I nodded. I’ve never lived west of Pittsburgh—I’ve moved around a lot in my life but only to more northerly or easterly places. This Southern California landscape is one I’ve only experienced in short visits, or seen in films, dusted with the sheen of imagination and editing. 

Of course, this is a real place; a palm tree is not less real than a pine. But if it’s not what you’re used to orienting yourself with—if a palm tree is not the tree whose bark your hands felt as a baby, the tree you posed in front of for prom pictures, or read your book with your back resting against it—it doesn’t feel real. 

So, in this groundless, unreal place, how do I orient myself? 

I keep thinking about a winter camping trip I went on in the Adirondacks in college and how the leaders taught us that if we got lost, we should look around and use our senses to orient ourselves. We did an exercise where we had to notice details we hadn’t noticed before and report back to the group afterwards from where we were.

I decide to try it. 

I see a bee buzzing around the yellow blossoms of the tree outside my window. 

I see the cashier at the gas station throwing his arms wide with a big grin on his face, saying “Welcome to LA!” 

I see Lulu trying five times at the gumball machine to find a red one for Kai (his favorite color) because she knows he had a tough day at school. 

I notice another new mom at my kids’ school who admits she’s frazzled and exhausted from their recent move and how grateful I am that she laughs at my self-deprecating joke. 

I feel this deep love for my family here, and my family and friends far away who are cheering us all on, reminding us that there was a time when we knew the ground we walked on and that we will get there again some day. 

This chaos has broken open my heart and I hope it won’t close back again fully once I know where everything is in my house and my brain doesn’t even have to think about where things go. Once I’m not the new person in the group and neither are my kids.  

Here I am praying that today, someone passes the ball to Kai in recess or gives him a high-five, or that someone appreciates how awesome Lulu’s tie-dyed bell bottoms are, rather than thinking they’re weird. 

I’m praying that my kids find friends they can be their full selves with. 

That they find their ground. 

That this time of chaos makes them stronger in who they are at their core, and more actively kind toward the kid on the outside of the circle. 

There’s always someone standing in chaos and scrambling for ground. There’s always someone looking for what’s real. 

---

Be Where You Are is a newsletter about how to use writing and mindfulness to be where you are. I have a lot of plans for this newsletter now that I’m on the other side of this move, including accountability threads for writing and mindfulness practices, zoom meetups and workshops, communal writing and meditation sessions, and a bunch of other wild and woolly ideas. I’d love to hear your ideas of what you would value and be excited about seeing here. You can reply to this email or comment below. I’d love to hear from you. You can also support this newsletter by liking, commenting & sharing it with other people. You can find me on Instagram or Facebook or find more info at my website. Thank you for reading! ✨✨