Sticky Notes

Three years today was a Monday.
2020.

It was the last day I welcomed my clients into my warm, intimate office. A space embraced with safety and compassion to contain the pieces of others’ lives that are gifted to me. Beginning January of that year, collectively and individually, my clients Sharpie’d sticky notes with their one-word commitments to themselves for the year, attaching them on an available wall in my office between the windows. I still see most of the sticky noted people, owners of those commitments, either in our not-so-new-anymore virtual worlds we’ve arranged with artificial backgrounds or outside on my back deck feeling the warmth of sunshine like lizards basking in the welcomed heat. I remind them of the container I remain for all their own uninvited thoughts. Their sticky’d notes still mostly clinging on the wall where they each left them almost begging to stay connected. One succumbed to my winter’s heater or the humidity of rainy days, that forced it to curl away from the wall. Like all of them, I deemed it important enough by scotch taping it securely to remain in residence. It reads: “Become self-reliant”.

Three years ago, this could have been the sticky note reminder for all of us as we shuttered in, separating ourselves from each other. We followed the guidelines of other, more historical plagues and diseases of our past like so many generations and centuries before: masking, washing, “perfuming” as it was called in the 15th century maybe equivalent to hand sanitizer dousing, we became accustomed, fleeing as if we could get away from IT, and quarantining – removing ourselves from one another. I believe we’ve mastered that technique too well. How do we begin to balance the need for separateness with the same need we have for closeness? Unlike so many who retreated: creating new hobbies, baking bread, renovating, reorganizing, enjoying home exercise and becoming their fittest yet by hauling backpacks filled with canned goods up and down their stairs, I worked harder, albeit a single screen (I hoped didn’t glitch mid-session) and a chair. I became more connected to others without chance to get bored, nor creative. I understood in weeks, months, years to come, I needed less and less from our material world as through one connection at a time. Just a screen and a chair. I had all I needed – more otherness.

Getting close again requires energy to show up with others in ways opposite of the separation these last few years have created. It may take courage, curiosity, and openness. A willingness to listen for something new in the ordinary, to learn, to grow, expand, with as much effort for ourselves as for others.

I hope our sticky notes read this year: Re-connect.