This week I found myself hiding out from the holidays in the one place I almost always find solace - the bookstore. I perused the staff picks (my favorite table), the fiction, and made a quick pass through the “learn how to be a better human” section before I landed in my other favorite area. I closely examined every journal and notebook option available, working my way around this corner of the store in a counterclockwise direction. At eleven o’clock I found myself faced with items I would have previously ignored without a second thought, but now the selection of writing instruments in various colors and groupings caught my attention and took me back in time.
Four or five years ago, before the word pandemic was part of our daily lives, the small team I managed sent me a few holiday gifts. They didn’t send wine or chocolates (rude). They each sent me a book, which is something I usually love more than wine.
One book was on leadership (a hint?), one was on life, and one was a journal. Accompanying the journal was a pack of colored pens
I was touched by the gifts, for sure. But I remember how I judged those pens. Who did the giver think I was? I was her manager, not a kindergarten teacher. I was a serious individual, and by serious I meant that I wrote using the only two dignified pen colors on the market. Blue or black. Red on the odd, serious occasion. Maybe a colored highlighter was used every once in a while and sparingly.
I kept the pens (I was serious but wasn’t an ingrate) but left them unopened in the bottom of a messy box where I kept all my “office supplies.”
Cut to a couple of years later. The word pandemic was now part of our daily lives. I’d already been working remotely from home since 2018, but now I was home, home. San Francisco was a ghost town. My biggest excitement was a neighborhood walk to the corner bodega to get “essentials” - which mostly meant chips and wine. If I was feeling less like the world was ending, sometimes a bag of salad or a head of broccoli got tossed in. Although not in the early days - when we thought we could catch COVID from our produce. Chips seemed safer.
I was pretty isolated, to put it mildly. This was fall 2020. I’d seen mention of an online workshop a friend was hosting. I was interested but hesitant to fork over the money to invest in a creative workshop for myself. In the eleventh hour, I finally registered and it’s probably not an exaggeration to say my life has not been the same since. My friend who created the workshop often talks about the magic of the community, and that’s the perfect word for it.
So, I started the workshop. By taking the plunge and signing up, by showing up to the first virtual session - something had already softened, already loosened in me. The act of just doing it had already started to open me up. Still for that entire first workshop (it lasts 3-4 months) - I stuck with my trusty blue and black pens. Maybe the OCCASIONAL red marker, because it was the only marker we had in the house at the time. You know the type. The sole Sharpie that you keep around for labeling moving boxes and yard sale signs. The workshop involved doing various creative exercises - the leader of the group is a Creative Coach. She’d always encourage us to use markers, pencils, stickers, and yes, colored pens.
I remembered that I did in fact own a set of colored pens. It was like they were glowing from the bottom of my office supply box during this time. Calling out to me. Like the batman signal. “Let us out to save Gotham!” Or at least to add some freaking color to the page. Who draws a map that is meant to illustrate their life, using only black?? Or, using only an angry red Sharpie?
But I wouldn’t give in. I was still a serious person. I was not a person, even in those dire circumstances, who used colored pens. I just couldn’t do it.
As I mentioned though, participating in this workshop changed me. I let it change me. I let it be an opening. I let it be a catalyst. I let it be a new community in my life. Less than a year after I joined that first cohort, I quit my job. At the time it didn’t feel like it, but looking back, in fairly quick succession - I quit the next job. In doing so I realized a lifelong dream which was to work for myself, as I haphazardly started my own freelance business. Since I joined the workshop, I’ve also walked a Camino - something I’d wanted to do for over a decade. I’ve met amazing people in each cohort, mostly online but have been lucky enough to meet a few of my co-workshopers in real life too.
I think it was around the time I quit my job - to try something new, to shake up my life, to see what else was possible - that I finally opened up that set of pens.
This was late summer 2021. Pandemic was a household word. Variants were a thing. Most of us had stopped the nightly clapping and cheering out our windows for essential healthcare workers - we’d literally lost our cheer - but at the same time, most of us were still thinking of people working and receiving care in those hospitals day-in and day-out. At this point, COVID is a leading cause of death in the U.S., with an average of 700 people dying from the virus per day. 630,868 people in the United States had died from COVID by late August 2021.
I certainly wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but maybe a part of me realized if there was ever a time to start living in color - it was then.
We’ve been through the wringer the past few years. But the pandemic gave many of us access to a couple of things that can be hard to find in this modern world: time and perspective.
Whether it was from sheltering in place, events being canceled, or working from home - a lot of us suddenly had more time. Time to think about the way we were living (or weren’t living). Time to think about what matters, and who matters to us. Time to be grateful for what we do have. Time to dream and imagine a better life, a better community, a better world, a better humanity.
As I write this it’s literally one of the darkest days of the year. And yet, the solstice offers us something we need. A reminder that our world, however chaotically, is still turning. We still orbit an amazing, albeit hotter, sun. The sun still rises to usher in a new day, before it hands off to the moon that illuminates our world by night.
The solstice reminds us that brighter days are coming. And that allows us to do one of the things that is uniquely human and that is to hope.
I hope you have a beautiful end of 2023, and that your new year is filled with abundance and adventure. I hope it is a year that you live in color.
So beautiful Laurel! Wishing you a colorful 2024.
Love everything about this!