7:50pm
As I'm writing this, there's ten minutes left on my screen time allowance.
It's a self imposed one. I'm learning, it seems, to do things that firstly take care of me. And this, friends, is one of those things.
I would arguably say that since 2016, when I returned home from living in the UK, I have always had many excuses to stay connected to my phone and devices well into the evening, and throughout the day. I was close friends with people who had walked through some real difficulties and transitions that I was facing just during those months prior. People who happened to live back in England when I was trying to make a way back in Australia. People who would be waking up when I was getting ready for bed.
Since working remotely through freelancing for a worldwide faith community, this has only exponentially grown my circle of social connections. So much so that at the end of last year, I travelled to the United States and hopped my way around the country visiting many of them.
They were people I felt well connected to. I dreamed of one day living closer to them. Even since returning years ago from the UK, I had repeatedly made half-baked plans to return there someway, somehow.
But I'm here, at 7:56pm (now) in Melbourne, Australia. Arguably a place I never truly thought I would end up living (despite having almost moved here in 2010, over twelve years ago). I'm here without having lived overseas since I came back to native soil to finish my law degree. And I'm making new shifts in this season to actually just sit. To rest. To not rush off into the dream land of a "different place or time."
It's 7:58. I have two more minutes with you in this blog entry. It's not long, and perhaps isn't the most poetic or powerful piece to the average eye, but it signifies a new step in the direction of liminal living. To be at peace with what we often label incorrectly as "the in-between space" where life, apparently, isn't happening.
But it's happening here. It's happening as I recover from a second round of COVID in two months. It's happening as I stretch and groan and reach exasperated for the finish line of Term 1 of the school year (I'm a school counsellor again... huh!). It's happening as I think about all that I historically supposed my life would look like in my 31st year. It's happening as I set my keys down on my side table after driving home from work. It's happening as I call my high school best friend and we exchange stories of the weird things that happen in our workplaces while I take an afternoon walk.
It's happening in the offline. It's happening in the unrushed spaces as much as the rushed. It's happening in the secret place. In the place of prayer. In the gorgeous knee knocking realisation of a truth of my indivisible worth whether I'm fitting in a HIIT workout (I'm not, because fatigue dictates otherwise) or being horizontal and in bed by 8:00.
It's 8:02pm.
I'll talk to you again soon, dear reader.
I hope you're encouraged to take the time. Sit in it. Don't scramble away. Disconnect and in doing so, reconnect. There's another voice that wants to speak to you in the quiet. And it's one that formed your very being and calls you "good."
