My Plan is to Welcome More Ease

A very short (turns out: not so short) note about a very gentle commitment I'm making

Hello, friends. It’s been awhile. I love that the last time I came by it was to write about how much I loved my sunflowers in 2024. Because 2024 was a year where I felt caught in a grind, and I couldn’t let go, even after I made it through a couple different crisis points.

The main crisis being, as always, work: losing a job out of the blue under extremely bizarre circumstances — um, government seizure of business? That was a new one. Expected 2024 bonus disappears up in smoke, no notice, no severance, nothing, and then no work for next three months as I scrambled to establish myself as a freelancer/consultant again after applying for 52 jobs and hearing back on only two of them — only to be ghosted. It was ugly. It was terrifying. I had just written a check for my oldest’s college tuition, bringing my case reserves close to zero ($640, to be exact), because, well, I was expecting a bonus and that would have refilled my coffers just four weeks after that tuition check cleared. But yeah, that’s what kicked off the Year of Hardcore Grind.

The grind begets the grind sometimes. And then it becomes a locked stance. It takes a the kind of pause that life doesn’t generally send along to shine light into my skull so I can see that. And give myself permission to exhale. And make room for a different way to handle fear and change.

I occasionally catch myself wondering if I have outlived “Filling in the Blanks” as the moniker for this place of writing — and then life revolves again and puts me back in a stance of filling in the blanks. “Ah, yes,” I murmur to myself. The world turns and we turn with it, always having to live through new cycles of being.

• AN ASIDE: I admit I have toyed with turning this into a gardening blog. And I have also considered making this into a place where I write about mindfulness and meditation practices and how to create space for peace in ourselves. Or turning it into a destination for the many, many women my age I know who are facing the reality of being underemployed and overlooked, which feels like a topic that could use a champion. Can I write about all of those things here and just let planning and elegance of structure and intent be damned? Not sure I am capable of that kind of pell-mell approach! And does using the word “pell-mell” make painfully clear that I am the kind of older woman who should clearly be underemployed??

I’m grateful for how I CAN dig in and submit to the grind when chaos drops into my life. But over time I’ve come to see that that capability is both a gift and bind — I deplete myself completely, and I lose all connection to trust that life is on my side, that I know how to do the right things, that I can apply myself without obliterating everything else out of my life. It’s a disassociative state, in all seriousness, and like many disassociations, it can be tied back to old coping habits that don’t serve me anymore.

So, this brings me to ease.

I got lucky — I was granted a few quiet weeks over the holidays where I had very little work. I am giving myself major points for being able to see not having work for a few weeks over the holidays could be nice — and not solely cause for more panic and fear (even though I had to do the math into January and February to be certain I would have expenses covered before really relaxing).

And in those quiet weeks I began to imagine a 2025 where I live my consultant life without constant hungry panic pulling at me. Where I seek and embrace ease, where I make room for it intentionally, where I believe that the universe will provide.

The ease doesn’t come from the circumstances (though I’ll do my best to manifest kindnesses from the universe). The ease has to come from within. From me.

I have two clients on hand for 2025, one providing a known base, the other flexes and ebbs and flows, so I never really am sure what I’ll earn in a given month. And I am still on the edge of zero, so that’s not exactly comfortable, but I am going to trust that I will do what needs to be done (in finding other work, in pulling more work from that client) so that I can live with ease. So that I can, with ease, be living in my body. So that I may, with ease, take care of my mind with meditation and long walks, even on very busy days (maybe short walks on those days). So that I can be present in my family with ease instead of sitting at the dinner table in body only, mind furiously computing what’s next, what’s next, what’s next, what do I need to do the second I stand up from here? So that I can look at my amazing (amazing because he tolerates me and loves me even though I am quite a stiff cocktail of a human being) husband and be with him with ease and ensure he feels loved and known and witnessed in the way he so deserves. As we all deserve.

I had the great good fortune to take a weekend meditation class with the truly remarkable Sharon Salzberg, who works in many meditation traditions, but relate her most strongly to “lovingkindness” meditation. In this practice, you intentionally connect with people in your mind during your meditation and wish them well, starting with someone you know and love and moving outward to include, say, neutral people in your life (your grocery checkout clerk), to people who cause you difficulty, to expand to include your whole town, displaced populations, the whole world, and then come back to yourself. It is from working with her that I first heard “ease” as a wish, an incantation, and a blessing.

May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.

When I first heard her say it in that room, my eyes pricked with tears. Ease. I don’t know ease, I thought. I turn away from ease. I don’t trust ease. (Must be on guard, another coping relic from a different time.) And that began a long and useful conversation with myself that I am returning to once again in 2025.

May I be happy. May I be healthy. And may I live with ease. May I approach life with ease. May I believe I deserve ease.

I am committing to ease as an act of gentle work I will try to do for myself this year. I’ll write more about some of the practices I am undertaking to invite ease inward, if they take root. And I’m going to see if I find a way to be more present on Substack with ease, as well. I often make too much of what or whether to post, when really, all I want is to be in quiet conversation with a handful of people who ask the same question about life that I do.

I appreciate all of you. May you be happy. May you be healthy. And may you live your life with ease, this year and always.