The Slippery Work of Staying
I just returned from ten days in California. For months, I had this trip on a devotional pedestal, the antidote to my winter blues, the remedy to the particular loneliness that settles in somewhere around mid February in Western Massachusetts. I’ve lived in New England for four years now, and I’ve come to recognize a pattern: mid-to-late winter, my adaptive self goes into full fantasy mode. Hours dissolving into Zillow, constructing elaborate scenarios, asking what if we just went back?
I had almost convinced myself, again, that California was the remedy. What I found instead was that there isn't one, not out there, anyway.
My clearer, more adult self knew this trip would be clarifying. Not comforting, clarifying. The difference between the two has been a reorganizing feature of growing up, learning to want the former over the latter, a kind of maturation. The trip was for my best friend’s 40th birthday. I would be surrounded by people I’ve loved for nearly twenty years, in a place I know like the back of my hand. I grew up in Santa Barbara, moved to LA at nineteen. Los Angeles is the city that grew me up, and what I discovered, with some surprise, is that it feels capable of receiving who I am becoming, not just who I was.
Santa Barbara was harder. Something about returning there made it difficult to bring her with me. The one who has been slowly emerging as the old protections loosen their grip. Some (if not all) of that is surely my own material. There's also a reason Buddhist cosmology names the God Realm as its own kind of trap; everything so beautiful, so warm, there's less friction to grow against. I felt that. The pleasantness itself disorienting, surfacing a longing in me that had nowhere useful to go. As much as I resist the winters here, I've come to trust what they ask of me.
But here is what landed most clearly on the fourteen-hour journey home: how slipperyit is, when I’m lonely or blue or uncertain, to bypass grief by externalizing it. To make it about place rather than what the longing is actually pointing at, the indestructibility of impermanence. The way everything ends. The specific and inescapable ache that comes from being an attached being in a world that won’t hold still.
Something I’ve come to understand through years of both personal practice and clinical work is that our capacity to be honest with ourselves is directly proportional to our capacity to grieve. For a long time, I would meaning-make every loss, rejection, or hurt into a lesson. A narrative that made the thing feel more tolerable in the moment. I was good at it. I thought I was processing.
What I didn’t understand then was that this was largely a nervous system response. A deeply embedded pattern, shaped by early experience, that protected me from having to fully meet the grief. When our window of tolerance for loss is narrow, we construct meaning compulsively. Not because we’re broken, but because we’re adaptive.
The work, spiritual and therapeutic, has been to widen that window. To develop what in Buddhist psychology we might call equanimity: not indifference, but the capacity to remain present with what is, without collapsing or fleeing. To be with the longing, the loneliness, the discontentment, and recognize, this doesn’t mean something is wrong. This doesn’t mean I need to fix something outside of myself. It means something inside needs not fixing but expanding. The kind of changing that comes through simply being, through stillness.
Full transparency, as I write this I am meaning-making. I am assembling a narrative that reframes my experience in a way that aligns with growth, a core value of mine. This is how experience and narrative shape each other, bidirectionally, recursively. Of course we can’t step outside of it entirely, we are meaning making beings. But we candevelop the capacity to witness ourselves doing it, and that witnessing creates just enough space to ask: is this story true, or is it just soothing? Sometimes it’s both, and that’s also allowed.
What I keep returning to is this: I can't go back to who I've been, and place was never really responsible for that. I am. Our old adaptations are seductive that way, cocoon-like, familiar in the body. Some landscapes simply make it easier to slip back into them without noticing. And the work I am committed to, the pruning, the staying awake, the willingness to be uncomfortable rather than cushioned. That work belongs to me, wherever I am standing.
The woman I am becoming is able to show up more fully for the people she loves than any previous version of me. More present. More honest. More capable of sitting with discomfort without trying to manage it away. And I genuinely believe that the pace of this place has contributed to that. The spaciousness, the seasons with their uncompromising insistence on change, and the winters that do not let you avoid yourself.
I’ve traded the ocean and mountains for rivers, woods and snow. The deeply familiar for the uncertain and still-emerging. And most days, I do actually know why.
This quote by Sophie Strand: “Make my healing a joy that leaks out of my life into the life of all my loved ones. Make my healing contagious and outrageous. Make my healing a party everyone is invited to.” That is the aspiration, to resource myself so genuinely, so honestly, so fully, that the overflow becomes nourishing to others. Not through self-sacrifice, but because I don't actually believe the boundary between self and other is as solid as we've been taught to believe. When I fill my own cup with intention, something in the relational field shifts. The people I love feel it, strangers I pass feel it. Tending to myself is, at its root, a relational act because separateness, in the end, is the illusion we are all slowly waking up from. To be a good meal for others to eat. To walk the walk of the bodhisattva, which is not a walk of perfection but of devoted, humble return.
The hero’s journey, as it’s commonly told, is about leaving the known world and returning home. What we talk about less is which home. Not the external one. Not California or Massachusetts, not the city that shaped you or the landscape that feels most like your nervous system. The home the journey is always orienting toward is the internal one, the one that can name loneliness without collapsing into the story that something is missing. The one that can feel the longing and recognize it as part of being alive, not as something to be solved.
“More and more I think of healing as being the amount of connections you can feel in your life. The points of interface. The communal interweaving,” (Strand). Perhaps it has nothing to do with where I am, maybe it’s about how permeable I am to the ecosystem of connection already around me; my neighbors, the barista, the stranger on the trail, the friends carried across decades and coasts. Our human family in its full, imperfect radius.
If you find yourself externalizing discomfort, fantasizing about a different city, relationship, job, season, I’m not suggesting the external things don’t matter, they do. Context is real. But it’s worth asking: is this desire pointing at something genuinely true about my needs? Or is it pointing at a grief, or the reality of impermanence that I haven’t yet been able to fully meet? Both can be true at once, and usually are.
Making the unwanted wanted, learning to be with what is, rather than perpetually organizing around what isn’t, is some of the most demanding and most worthwhile work of adulthood and you’re all invited to the party, near or far.
