Broadway Bridge, Portland Oregon
Shortly after moving to Portland, I was struck by a commonality I observed in many of the people I was meeting and/or trying to befriend. It seemed as though making plans with others in advance was a bit of a foreign concept. Instead people would make attempts to connect more on the fly to accommodate how they were feeling on that particular day. I realized a few months in, that playing by ear didn't quite fit and so the term 'play by feel' was born.
Moving to a new place at the ripe age of 39 is no easy endeavor. Particularly when the place you move to is quite different from what you know and where you come from. Learning the culture of the Northwest and how to best navigate has felt much like growing pains, but has also tested my ability to practice mindfulness in ways that look and feel a lot like love. I've had to practice openness, curiosity, flexibility, and being vulnerable.
The irony is that my time here in Portland has also opened me up to feeling more love than ever before. Not the kind of love you would imagine I would be talking about such as romantic love for that one special person, but instead feeling love and appreciation for what happens when the weather changes in this city.
After months of cold, rain, and even snow, feeling the sun's rays takes on a whole new meaning. The people, the plants, the rivers, and oceans all come to life and glisten when the temperature rises.
During a yoga class recently, the teacher told us that someone said to her 'live your life as though it were summer all the time' and it dawned on me that summer time in Portland is transformational for the people just as much as it is for the landscape. The city comes alive with a completely new energy that transforms everyone's mood and their desire to be communal with one another and with nature.
Now that I've spent some time here (about a year and a half), I have a new understanding of play by feel and how it's so closely related to the strong force that Portland weather has on its inhabitants. People here have to acclimate. One definition of acclimate is to respond physiologically or behaviorally to change in a single environmental factor. People here do just that, because they have no other choice but to accept what the weather wants to do on any given day. Like it or not, they adjust.
This got me to thinking about how I could tie together the way that people in Portland acclimate to its erratic weather with how we as people approach life in general.
What if the uncertainty, the ups and downs, the hot and cold, the storms and sunshine, the gray and clear skies were a metaphor for life's happenings?
Would we then be able to better cope with change if we told ourselves that 'Life is like the Weather'?
We don't have much control over what happens to us in life, sometimes things make sense and other times, we want to pull our hair out and curse God's name because things feel confusing, unjust or too painful.
It seems to me that the best remedy for living in accordance with life's ebbs and flows is to accept that the only constant is change. Just like the weather, nothing ever stays the same and this is what we can count on so why not navigate through life in this way.
Play by feel...moment to moment, breath by breath.