The Compound Effect
I told my friend who hosts our Nantucket trip that I liken these annual trips to therapy only it is not available on demand. I just returned late Monday night from what has become my annual gal’s trip to paradise and like all trips before this one, there is a tendency to want to tie up the themes in a nice little bow afterwards. Only this year’s themes were plentiful and ranged from cancer to pergolas and so it was really hard to find the common denominator at the end.
However, on the return home, the bow presented itself for me anyway, in a business book that was written called The Compound Effect, which I liken to the Buddhist saying a drop of water exerts the most force. Do small things everyday and you will reach your goal.
At the start of my trip as I sat in my friend’s house getting ready to go visit clients in Boston, and while I was on the phone with the IRS scheduling monthly payments for my taxes and penalty from a retirement withdrawal to buy the Spirit House, a friend rang in that my dear friend had transitioned. Stage Four Ovarian Cancer. My friend turned 50 last week, she was the mother of a 12 year old and a 15 year old and the loving wife of a man I admire. The notion she is no longer with us, with them, is so hard for me to fathom that I cannot. It remains swirling in my mind like a great mystery. For 24 hours leading up to that call, she was heavy on my mind, not like a weight, but more like a calling, call her I kept thinking, call her now, and I hadn’t done it as I was traveling away from her while she was traveling away from us.
I began to dissect the Tao, which I had brought with me, #1 the naming is the origin of all particularities, #2 when people see things as beautiful they see other things as ugly, #3 practice non doing and everything will fall into place, #4 the Tao is filled with infinite possibilities, #5 the Tao doesn’t take sides, and #6 the Tao is called the great mother, empty yet inexhaustible. And on and on.
I tried to hold any worries of debt, of work, of death in abeyance even as we took off from the same airport where seven people had died a few days earlier. Instead, I embraced the bounty of what was in front of me – friendship, time away, Nantucket, my friend’s beautiful house, delicious food, and above all the love and laughter of friends yoked together in a respite. I was tickled pink – literally – from the headiness of abundance that this trip offered up yet again. ACK has not let me down.
I returned to my lawn guy apoplectic because he hadn’t gotten paid, to ten U.S. Marshalls on the corner looking for “someone” with bulletproof vests and artillery visible, to a man who was found dead, shot, in his backyard a few blocks from my house, to heat, and my plants wilted, and to the ever rising cascade of uncertainty that has plagued my finances for the last couple of years. I came home to it, I embraced it, and I went and saw friends for nachos and a margarita.
At the end of the day, it is the Compound Effect. The abutilon (a cutting taken at the last minute from the LaLa when I was moving) is blooming with the vitex out front, the sunflower (seeds planted in early spring) heads are about to blossom in back, the rains have returned to help the plants weather the heat, and it’s summer in the city. I made an appointment with my life coach to work on my career path. I unpacked, cleaned, and began chipping away at the paperwork that awaited me on my desk. I washed clothes, and went to the grocery, and picked a bowl full of ripe tomatoes from the garden. I played and loved on Tin and Stella.
Bit by bit I’m re-entering my life. Every day I will write one thing and add it to my gratitude jar. Right now, the entry is NANTUCKET.
#girlsofsummer
