Written by: Angela C M Cox, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
I have discovered in middle age that there is no pure, unadulterated emotion left to me. In moments of joy, there is always the underlying recognition of how ephemeral that joy is. Moments of grief are often accompanied by the relief that we can finally uncurl our clasped fists and let go. And in moments of frustration or fear, there creeps hope to nudge us onward.
Nothing is pure, and that's okay. Because in the mingling of tears and joy, the junction of grief and relief, there is enormous power. I learned the other day that one of the holiest places in the world is considered to be at the confluence of three sacred rivers.
A watershed in nature is one river meeting and tumbling into another, and so when we talk about watershed moments in life, moments in time when something changes irrevocably, we are talking about the sacred power of confluence.
Not separation, but connection. Mingling. Coming together. The holy madness of mixing everything up.
As summer winds down in the northern hemisphere, it bears all the hallmarks of a transitional moment. The kids are starting back to school. The light is changing in the evenings. The flowers in the garden are making showy displays like the grand finales of a fireworks display. It feels too soon to say goodbye to the season, but the school buses passing my house tell me it’s time to start planning a fond farewell.
Time to collect my thoughts lest I get caught by the L'esprit de l'escalier when the summer party ends.
Time to check the acorn stash to make sure there are enough resources to get through the winter.
This is one of those transitional moments we encounter so frequently in life when everything changes, but it happens so gradually we aren’t sure of the precise tipping point that landed us on the other side of the changes.
Like the way people tell new parents to “Enjoy this time! It all goes so fast!”
Or the way you wake up to an anniversary – pleasant or painful – and wonder how a year or two or five have passed.
One thing we tend to do in moments of transition is celebrated. The good things that have happened. The decisions and hard work that got us here.
While you celebrate the successes and wins as you so rightly should, do not ignore those things that felt like failures and losses and defeats. Because those were as important - if not more so ‒ than all the good that happened. Because without those, we would have learned nothing. As the poet Rilke says: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
It is undeniably true that we learn more from our failures than our successes. The beauty of rejection is that it leaves us open to receiving dozens of others things, perhaps equally good. Maybe even better.
So maybe the true secret to a fulfilling life is something as simple as “Celebrate everything.” In whatever way you can, to the best of your broken heart's ability, honor the hard stuff even as you raise a glass to toast the good. Because it’s hard and often messy being human. And yet some of the best things in life are messy. Love, childbirth, cream-filled pastries, playing in puddles after a storm, truly connecting to another human being. Messy, but oh-so-beautiful. Celebrate it all because, as the philosophers tell us, we cannot wade into the same river twice. We can, however, celebrate the messy, mingled confluence of all of life’s seasons, knowing how quickly it all changes and knowing that holding onto anything – joy or sorrow, goodness or grief – is like trying to hold water in our hands.
For more information about Three Kindnesses, check out https://threekindnesses.com or follow us @3Kindnesses on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Angela C M Cox, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine After beginning her career as a college professor, Dr. Angela Cox has spent two decades in HR and Learning and Development at Fortune 500 companies. From designing meaningful learning experiences to facilitating leadership development programs and consulting around employee engagement and organizational effectiveness, she was consistently focused on how to increase employee satisfaction and psychological safety through deliberate acts of kindness and inclusion. Despite an ever-growing list of skills and credentials, Angela and her neurodivergent brain often found it difficult to fit in and to find places where she could do her best work. Finally, after years of toning down her passion and shaving on her quirky edges to try and fit into a corporate mold, Angela co-founded Three Kindnesses in order to give others the permission she always wanted in her own workplace environments. Permission for people to be themselves, quirky edges and all. An emerging voice of encouragement and inspiration in the neurodivergent community and an ambassador for deliberate, radical kindness, Angela is also the author of two soon-to-be-released books on "How to Be Kind" and a contributing writer to Entrepreneur's Leadership Network.
