Sometimes, you read an article and realize it was sent to you from The Universe. That happened to me today.
This morning I woke up, relieved that I finally enjoyed a good night’s sleep. I meditated and then I checked my email. I clicked on a message from Elephant Journal, and suddenly I was reading this article: The Eckhart Tolle Quote That’s Keeping Me Sane During This Pandemic.
The instant I started reading it, I knew karma was involved.
The author, Katie Meuse, explains how she’s experiencing endless emotional swings that veer from feeling calm to helpless to feeling like a sloth for eating an extra batch of cookies. (There’s no shame in that. I think we’ve all been there.)
Then, she goes on to say this:
I catch myself feeling like a hero as all the cooking, laundry, and cleaning is under control. Then it’s feeling stifled and exhausted like I traveled back to the 1950s as all the cooking, laundry, and cleaning is under control.
– Katie Meuse
This is the exact conversation I had with my therapist this week. I told her how exhausted I was feeling after helping out in the kitchen, as well as doing the laundry and the cleaning. If I have to unload the dishwasher one more time, I’m going to explode, I told her.
“You’re feeling like a 1950s housewife,” my therapist said. “And you’ve never wanted to be a 1950s housewife.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve never wanted to be a 1950’s housewife.”
But the complicated thing is that my husband is a huge help. He does ALL the cooking, ALL the grocery planning, and he picks up ALL the food.
The other thing is that I actually feel calm and productive when I clean our house. It can be meditative, allowing me to calm my busy mind while I concentrate on wiping down the counter or folding a load of laundry.
So… I’m mad that I have to clean the house, but I’m happy that it’s clean. I’m simultaneously loving and hating feeling like a 1950’s housewife, and it’s making me crazy.
This is why I found comfort in Katie’s article. She perfectly describes the emotional rollercoaster we are all riding. One day, we’re on top of the world. The next, we’re at the bottom.
She closes out her piece with this quote from Eckhart Tolle:
“Don’t look for peace. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.”
-Eckhart Tolle
This week I’m going to work on forgiving myself for not being at peace. Forgiveness seems to be the only way to manage the emotional rollercoaster that I expect I’ll be riding until the end of this pandemic.