MAD THINGS

The definition I choose is “wild and crazy,” not “in a particularly bad mood.”
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If I have learned anything along this bumpy journey it is to watch where I’m going. I feel the instinctive me counting to the rhythm of my steps. Still, the pensive part is trying to reconcile what has transpired and what is still ahead.

To walk in unfamiliar places requires paying attention—
to footing
to terrain
to surroundings
to breath

Not three blocks from where I’m staying, I have discovered the matcha mecca, a tiny, unassuming truck containing everything necessary for my beloved pick-me-up including loving people with impressively big smiles.

The name suits my disposition. This Mad Matcha reaches into the part of me that feels wild, disoriented, untethered, unkept.

My walk of four hundred and two steps.
It demands a new kind of presence and persistence that I have not been previously asked to give.

Small tasks. Deep breaths.

One step and then the other. Not everything all at once.
I realize as one foot and then the other finds pavement that the treatments are discreetly taking little parts of me that the sunshine is doing its best to give back.

It’s a strange season of me meeting my body, when it has met me so many times before this—
I still work out. And walk. And clean. And garden.
But there is a beautiful awareness, a slowing even, that allows me to marvel at my ability and extend grace that I seem so limited.

There. Is. No. Rush.
Four words that are foreign to nearly everything I have been.

One thing and then the next…and next. Organized and ready for me to take on a full schedule. This was me. And I was so proud of it. And maybe I still am.

But something in me no longer insists that everything line up the way it used to. Busy is no longer my style. But creative thinking…and living…still very much is.

Sometimes we do mad things not because we are reckless, but because we have learned to trust ourselves…

Saying yes to what we can’t fully explain.
Allowing ourselves to be transported to places we didn’t plan to be.
Moving forward without the kind of certainty we once demanded.

Even now, there are parts of me still trying to make sense of it.
Still reaching for answers inside of so much change.

But I can feel something else, too. Something quieter.

A reliance on a history of being carried through things I didn’t fully understand at the time.

Not carelessly.
Not without questions.
But forward.

I can sense it in something as pedestrian as a walk.
My mind trying to reconcile,
My body already in motion—
Keeping rhythm.
Not asking for my permission.
Just continuing on.

Four hundred and two steps to something familiar.
Something green.
Something placed in my hands by people who do not know my story, but meet me in it anyway.

It should feel small. It doesn’t.
It feels so abundant it makes me cry.

There are heavy things, mad things, to attend to.
But today, my walk is tempered with the thought of nothing else.

A walk is a marvel.
A miracle.
A gift.
And I am mad about it all.

NOTES

There are seasons when understanding arrives long after movement does.

Where something in us continues forward before the mind fully catches up.

What have you already lived through
that taught you
you could keep going
without fully knowing?

Image: Today the clinic took 160cc of my blood to create a personalized vaccine designed to teach my natural killer cells to recognize what no longer belongs. Later, I walked four hundred and two steps to enjoy a matcha in the sun. If that isn’t just a bit “mad” I don’t know what is.