Written by: Angela C M Cox, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The 100-year old red bricks had separated in the middle of the street, tangible evidence of a century’s worth of carriage, car, and foot traffic. Millions of wheels pushing at the edges had successfully obliterated any order the center once had. It was my favorite street to meander down on my daily walks through that neighborhood, and I came to think of it as the Unzipped Road. Those original bricks, once set in straight lines and snuggled cozily next to each other, now angled awkwardly. Like the hour after the Thanksgiving meal when we seek the comfort and release of a loosened button or two, the road had surrendered its mortar corset fifty years ago and inhaled deeply.
That was the year before a series of rapid changes upended everything in my comfortable life. For years afterwards, miles away in a completely different city, I would think of that small-town street and contemplate whether the pressures of life were breaking me. Or whether the pain I was experiencing was some clumsy expansion of my heart, the unzipping of my inner core just to survive while life continued to roll relentlessly over me.
One of my favorite concepts learned many years ago in grad school days was the ponderous and awkward-on-the-tongue word “Palimpsest.” It comes from pre-parchment days when animal skins were used for writing things down, and when you were finished with whatever you had written, you just scraped off the old characters to make room for the new.
Except you can never truly get rid of the old.
It remains there just under the surface, teasing your eyes. Shadowy vestiges impacting your present long after you tried to scrape them into the past. Eventually a palimpsest came to be anything that is reused but still bears traces of its past forms.
And this is maybe one of the most perfect examples of art imitating life. Because while we talk about letting go of the past all the time, the past seldom lets go of us. At any moment, we can be pulled back there. One look, one word, one fragrance and we are free-falling back in time against our will. Every day is a battle with ghostly fingers that refuse to loosen their grip on our hearts.
In a way, it’s like living with two calendars.
One is forward into the future. Our daily to-do list of meetings and obligations and birthdays, anniversaries, special occasion reminders. Groceries to buy. Repairmen to call. Errands and school events. Clothes left at the dry cleaners for far too long. But the other calendar we don’t talk about. It’s a backwards-looking diary, the engraved etchings of the past. A palimpsest over which we live each day, this phantom calendar is rife with anniversaries known perhaps only to us: a grievous loss, a serious life change, a diagnosis, a sobriety milestone, a small victory never shared, but cherished deeply nevertheless. The older we get, the more our phantom diary fills up. The more likely it is that each day already has that penciled-in pain or not-fully-erased memory attached to it. We feel those vestiges when we wake in the morning and recognize that this day will not be without memories and ghosts. We come to understand that the one-way street of each new day runs concurrently with a well-worn roundabout of grief.
The forward calendar is our future and our hope. It’s why we get out of bed in the morning and keep going, But the phantom calendar is what made us who we today, and it’s what makes our soul muscles ache and the joints of our heart creak a bit as we rise to meet the day even as we resolutely try not to think about it.
But for us not to recognize this duality of life means we are often writing over that pain without acknowledging its effects. While that is a legitimate and necessary kind of coping – in this unkind life, we’ve glued ourselves back together so often, we don’t even notice the stickiness much anymore – there is still a cost involved.
There is a cost to not recognizing and honoring our grief, and the price we pay is in disconnection and despair. Like trying to pretend nothing is wrong while climbing a mountain weighed down with a 100-pound backpack. It’s the daily habit of “I’m fine” accompanied by a smile that never reaches the eyes.
We pay a price every day when a distraught soul chooses to leave this world because we hesitated to speak of and normalize our collective loneliness.
I once told a friend that I couldn’t understand why the weight of humanity’s collective loneliness hadn’t knocked the earth off its axis.
She smiled enigmatically. “Because of what’s underneath,” she said.
I waited quietly for her to continue.
“We only know loneliness because we have known connection and lost it. We only know grief because we had love and lost it. But connection and love are still there, underneath it all. In the spaces where kind people hold the weight for us. Until either it lessens or until we are strong enough to carry it again ourselves.”
Because of what’s underneath.
What lies beneath the surface of all of us is unseen and yet affects us more deeply than anything that meets the eye.
This pandemic world has taken a profound toll on everyone. There is grief and frustration. There is anger and empathy fatigue. There is an old life and an old “normal” that we have lost ‒ maybe forever ‒ and the weight of it makes us stumble, sometimes unkindly, into others who are off-balance, too.
I have seen all of this, but I have also seen underneath. People still trying to care, to connect, to extend grace, to be kind and carry the weight until others can grow strong and bear the weight for themselves again.
Acts of kindness hold the weight. Acts of kindness keep the world spinning on its axis. Acts of kindness stretch and expand and unzip our hearts. They enable the compassionate loosening that lets us bend without breaking.
I recently had a reason to visit my Unzipped Road again, and while it is much the same as it was years ago when I walked it daily, I was struck by a new beauty in the fading terra cotta stones. It was still falling part, but falling apart in such a beautiful way, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful.
It reminded me that falling apart isn’t a bad thing. It’s not something to fear or avoid.
In fact, falling apart is a kind of grace. The ultimate act of self-compassion. It lets you breathe a while and gather your strength. It lets you sink into the kindness of another human being and find connection and hope again.
Falling apart means you have the wisdom and the courage to trust what’s underneath.
Angela Cox, PhD, is an organizational effectiveness consultant and Founder of Three Kindnesses.
For more information about Three Kindnesses, check out https://threekindnesses.com or follow us @3Kindnesses on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Angela C M Cox, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine After beginning her career as a college professor, Dr. Angela Cox has spent two decades in HR and Learning and Development at Fortune 500 companies. From designing meaningful learning experiences to facilitating leadership development programs and consulting around employee engagement and organizational effectiveness, she was consistently focused on how to increase employee satisfaction and psychological safety through deliberate acts of kindness and inclusion. Despite an ever-growing list of skills and credentials, Angela and her neurodivergent brain often found it difficult to fit in and to find places where she could do her best work. Finally, after years of toning down her passion and shaving on her quirky edges to try and fit into a corporate mold, Angela co-founded Three Kindnesses in order to give others the permission she always wanted in her own workplace environments. Permission for people to be themselves, quirky edges and all. An emerging voice of encouragement and inspiration in the neurodivergent community and an ambassador for deliberate, radical kindness, Angela is also the author of two soon-to-be-released books on "How to Be Kind" and a contributing writer to Entrepreneur's Leadership Network.
