circles

Dear friend,

I am on the train homeward from Bucharest after dropping off a dear friend at the airport. She is Canada-bound, heading to a Christian wilderness and leadership summer camp for the next two months (Coldwater!). I’ve known her since my first summer here back in 2016 when she was only twelve years old, and we’ve spent the past nine months sharing my apartment in Dallas, and so you can only imagine how emotional I was seeing her off on her first flight, her first journey abroad, her first solo adventure into another country and culture. Seven years ago, I got on a plane to spend my summer in her part of the world, and now she gets on a plane to spend her summer in mine. How full life is of these funny little circles, uniting us all. 

A few weeks ago I spent the latter part of a long weekend in Retezat National Park with three friends. We hiked up to spend the first night at a little refuge next to the shepherd’s hut on Scorota, the second day we hiked up and over the ridge and down to the refuge at Buta, and then the final day we hiked out, down the long road to Cheile Butii. I had done several parts of this route on prior hikes, past trips scrapped together into my own memory map of this landscape. Some places were very familiar, some completely new, and some touched on the distant memory of my very first hike in Romania. Circles, indeed. Our first night we ate homemade bread and raw veggies and fresh sheep’s cheese that we bought from the shepherds after watching them come down the mountain with their flocks at dusk. We watched the mists come up and cover our mountain, and us. We made a modest fire and watched Venus appear over the ridge, the first bright thing in the sky. If we had only spent that one night out on the mountain and returned the next morning, it still would have been enough. A night like that can make your soul breathe easy.

I’m thinking about my life a lot these days—where I’ve come from, and where I’m going. All of these circles overlapping and compounding. I think I’ve been feeling some symptoms of burnout lately, which can be confusing and difficult, but the hidden blessing is that I have been compelled to take a really clear look at my life. Sometimes we have to take a step back, a step away, and look at our lives a bit from the outside. Sometimes we have to take time to breathe, to reflect, to regroup. It can be easy to get stuck on autopilot, to let the days and the months start going by without realizing where you are or what (or how) you’re doing. 

And so, when I finally stopped for a moment to think about what and how I’m doing, I realized I felt stuck. I felt exhausted on an emotional level, and frozen in my exhaustion in a sort of inexplicable way. And I wasn’t sure what to do about it.

I guess I’m still trying to figure it out, but I have this hunch that the answer lies in movement. Not physical movement necessarily (although that works too), but movement in the sense of anything that allows me to keep some forward momentum in some small way, even if I’m staying in one place. And I guess this too comes back to circles, because forward movement doesn’t necessarily mean advancing on a straight line. I think that life more often than not moves in circles as we accumulate years in similar places or circumstances, and maybe it looks like you can’t really get anywhere stuck in a loop, but maybe we should look closer. Maybe this circular movement, this spiraling in one place (but always in a slightly different way, because you can never live the same thing twice), is a way of deepening and expanding our experiences and indeed our very lives. Maybe circles are what can help us stay present without staying stuck.

I am home now, and my apartment is quiet. The daylight is lingering oh so late. I am exhausted from travel and so I will close this letter now with a small hope: may we find movement and beauty and meaning in the circles of our lives! 

With love,

Xenia

P.S. in case anyone else is dealing with similar feelings of “stuck-ness,” here are some things that are helping me lately:

-get coffee with a friend and talk about how you actually are

-go camping

-pick up a new (or old) hobby

-wake up early and write morning pages

-make list of things you would like to do/be in the future —> write down three actionable steps that you could do to bring you closer to one of these goals

-make a list of your current points of sadness or stress —> write down three actionable steps that you could do for each to move in the right direction

-have a video call with a friend who lives far away

-go on a walk

-go to confession

-take stock of your behaviors (what you do), your beliefs (what you think is true), and your conditions (the circumstances you’re in)…make changes when necessary 

-set up a daily routine

-every morning make a list of three priorities for the day

-connect with someone new

-add a new prayer to your prayer rule (daily prayers)