These days, hiking involves trudging through a mess of mud. Life is a lot like that. Karina Moreno has this Perspective.
To be a Bay Area hiker right now involves gushing streams, neon green moss, crisp air, and wildflowers flirting to make their entrance.
It also means a whole lot of mud.
Typically, when I hike in the mud, I teeter along the edges of a trail, trying to find dry, higher ground so as not to sink into wet earth. But lately, the trails are so saturated, there is little stability to be found. Everything is soaked, slippery, treacherous.
Instead of maneuvering around the edges, I’ve been learning to trudge through the mud, momentarily sinking and sliding while pulling myself out of the muck.
It dawns on me that this is an apt metaphor for life right now – slowing down, embracing mess, and putting one foot in front of the other so as not to get permanently stuck in the mud.
We are living in a time where the literal and proverbial storms are not letting up – destructive weather, a never-ending pandemic, mass shootings.
And those are the shared stressors. Add any number of individual hardships we carry every day – the sudden job loss, the college rejection, the late-stage cancer diagnosis.
Last Tuesday, a giant tree fell across our backyard, collapsing two decks, and landing on our roof. Only our teenage children were home. They said it was quick, loud and felt like an earthquake. Neither was injured, but had the tree fallen a few feet in either direction, it could have hit one of them.
While we were cleaning up debris, my son commented about how much mud the tree carried – coating our yard with its thick and heavy sludge.
The Buddhist spiritual leader, Thich Nhat Hanh, said, "No mud, no lotus."
I’m trying to stay grateful for the lotus of life.
With a Perspective, I’m Karina Moreno.
Karina Moreno works for a charitable foundation in San Francisco.
