Oopsie, Daisy!

On contrast, capacity, and why we should try to feel it all

There have been a lot of oopsies this past year.

Not in the cute way people use the word “oopsie” when they slightly burn their banana bread or accidentally send a text to the wrong person. I mean real ones. The kind that cracks your confidence a little… or a lot. The kind of oopsie that makes you stare at the ceiling at 2 a.m. replaying conversations, choices, timing, reactions, losses. The type of oops that forces you to meet versions of yourself you did not particularly enjoy meeting. Some things were well within my control, and some weren’t. C’est la vie. This year has held heartbreak, uncertainty, disappointment, embarrassment and fear.

But somehow, at the exact same time, it has also held beauty so staggering. I almost missed some of it trying to survive, but still didn’t, thank God. After a few years of doing many gratitude exercises and practices, the fruits of that labor finally arrived when it felt doable and almost habitual to see the good during the bad.

Isn’t that the wild thing about being alive? Nothing arrives alone, and it generally arrives with a ton of contrast.

The Human Nervous System Is Insane

I have had mornings and long nights this last year where I cried so hard my chest hurt, followed by laughing until I couldn’t breathe. I have experienced deep loneliness while simultaneously being deeply loved. I have felt completely lost while accidentally stumbling into parts of myself I had been trying to find for years. There were moments I genuinely thought, surely the human nervous system was not designed for this much emotional whiplash.

And yet, apparently, it was. It is.

I think we often imagine feeling “okay” as arriving at some emotionally stable plateau where everything finally makes sense. Like one day we become fully healed, fully evolved, fully certain versions of ourselves who never spiral in the shower or romanticize moving to the woods after one or two difficult weeks or months.

Life doesn’t work like that and does not seem particularly interested in making us one thing at a time. It is constantly asking us to hold contradiction.

Grief and gratitude.

Joy and uncertainty.

Love and resentment.

Relief and sadness.

Hope and realism.

I do believe we are meant to hold it all. And, when holding one oopsie, we get the gift of a daisy if we make a point of not numbing out. The full spectrum being able to feel… all the oopsies and daisies- are found by increasing your capacity to hold contrast without collapsing under it.

And maybe that is why I keep thinking about two strangers I met on the same morning recently. The weather was disgusting.

One man was walking through sleet and freezing rain sticking his tongue out at the sky like a child. Dancing. Laughing. Seriously! Clearly with someone he loved. The weather was objectively awful, but somehow, he was still inside the day, even possibly above the nature of the day instead of underneath it.

Later that morning, I met a woman running a flower stand who told me immediately the weather was depressing, her apartment was leaking, the city was miserable, nobody was accountable for anything anymore, and she wanted to leave the city entirely. She said she hated it here. Wanted sunshine. Wanted out.

And the strange thing was… both of them were standing in the same weather. I’m sure the first guy had life stuff happening too. And maybe I just caught the flower stand lady at the wrong time.

I left thinking about how we all contain both people. The person dancing in the sh*t and the person hating their life.

Because sometimes life genuinely is difficult. Apartments leak. Relationships end. Bodies fail us. Grief arrives uninvited. The nervous system gets overwhelmed. Some days really are heavy enough to make everything feel gray around the edges and make us want to leave everything behind and begin again.

But I am beginning to suspect that suffering and orientation are not always the same thing. Some people become so identified with the storm that they forget they are separate from it. Others somehow continue creating warmth inside of it, despite it usually.

It isn’t because life has been kinder to them. Definitely not because they are delusional or pretending pain is not real. But because somewhere along the line, they learned that joy is not something handed to you once conditions improve.

It is a posture- and posture requires energy and the commitment to correction.

I don’t mean toxic positivity. I also don’t mean denying grief or pretending difficult things are beautiful while they are actively destroying you. I just mean there seems to be a difference between feeling pain and building a home inside of it.

I think that is part of capacity too.

The ability to say: this hurts, this is disappointing, this season is difficult…

but you still remain available for awe.

Because the rain comes either way. And maybe one of the realest privileges of being alive is realizing we can stand in identical circumstances while inhabiting entirely different emotional realities.

I kept thinking after I left the flower stand:

I do not think the Sunshine Coast would make her happy either. And I do not say that cruelly or with judgement.

I say it because I think all of us have had moments where we believed the next city, next relationship, next season, next version of ourselves would finally remove the ache from being human. But life does not seem particularly interested in removing contrast.

Only deepening our ability to hold it.

Let Everything Happen to You

There is a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke that says:

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”

I think about this quote a lot. Rent free in my head at times. I like to resist the idea that I need to let terror happen to me sometimes.

But she IS right… the human experience is not clean or linear or emotionally organized into neat little chapters where one lesson ends before the next begins. Sometimes your dream life arrives looking the same as your breakdown. Sometimes the thing that breaks your heart also expands it. For example, a betrayal can build your sense of self and ruin you before the next inevitable daisy emerges. The rain ends and the flowers bloom. Sometimes the exact season you want to escape is the one introducing you to yourself.

I used to think being emotionally healthy meant becoming less sensitive. Now I think it might mean becoming more capable of staying present. Not hardening, not shutting down. Not becoming so terrified of pain that you accidentally numb yourself to beauty too.

The cost of avoiding heartbreak and pain is often avoiding awe. And I want to be in awe. If it is going to hurt this bad, I still want daisies in life, too.

The Daisies

Awe is everywhere when you stop treating your life like a problem to solve long enough to notice it. It is in coffee with your mother on a gloomy day. It can be noticed in dogs resting their heads on your lap, even when you are too tired to continue. In songs that arrive out of nowhere while driving home at night after a heartbreak. It can be found in strangers being unexpectedly kind after someone close to you was unexpectedly hurtful. Maybe your body relaxes after weeks of tension. One night, you’ll find yourself laughing so hard you forget what you were anxious about for a moment.

Especially though: in realizing you survived something you once thought would destroy you completely, and on top of that, you grew from it. Like a daisy.

This year humbled me deeply.

There were plans that failed. Versions of myself that failed. Relationships that changed containers. Dreams that evolved- some for the better and some for the worse. Realizations I did not ask for. Consequences I had to sit with. Moments where I handled things beautifully and moments where I absolutely did not handle things with grace.

Alot of oopsies but many daisies. Looking for the light in things really helped me move through all of the ever-changing weather of my life.

Temporary Weather, Permanent Conclusions

I think sometimes we mistake temporary emotional weather for permanent identity.

A hard year becomes I am failing.

Heartbreak becomes I am unlovable.

Confusion becomes I am behind.

But feelings are not always facts. Sometimes they are just storms moving through a nervous system trying very hard to make sense of a complicated world. And if I have learned anything lately, it is that capacity is built and usually earned.

It doesn’t come during certainty. Or during the highlight reel moments, instead, in the ordinary act of continuing through adversity.

Continuing to love people.

Continuing to create.

Continuing to soften after disappointment instead of calcifying around it.

Continuing to risk joy and love despite knowing everything is probably temporary.

There is something profoundly brave about looking for daisies when you have every reason not to.

Anyways. Here Are the Flowers.

Maybe resilience and expansion are not about becoming untouchable. Maybe it is not becoming unaffected, either. Maybe resilience and embracing the human experience is about becoming someone who can carry the full spectrum of being human- warts and all- without needing every difficult season to mean something catastrophic about who they are.

Becoming someone who can survive embarrassment without becoming ashamed of themselves.

Someone who can lose things without losing themselves.

Someone who can feel grief without becoming incapable of seeing beauty.

Someone who can practice gratitude when there is often very, very little to be thankful for.

Maybe the whole point is becoming someone who can experience a lot of oopsies…

and still notice the daisies.