ON TURNING 26: ON KINDNESS AND COURAGE IN EQUAL MEASURE

Each year I try to write a “letter to me” - my attempt to lay, year by year, a sort of blueprint by which to trace my growth and the tiny pieces that are creating the mosaic of this beautiful, and also sometimes hard, life I’m living. This letter is written almost exactly 6 months late in the middle of a pandemic that has us all thoughtful and reflective and I can’t think of a better time to finally put “pen to paper.” 

You got to mark this birthday three times over. At home on the west coast when you were there on a business trip, in a small flat in Toronto, and again when you got home to Ottawa. While you do not know what twenty-six will bring, when you look back over your twenty-fifth year, it seems clear that it taught you of kindness and courage in equal measure. It reminded you that it takes daily work to cultivate fire in your belly and kindness in your soul.

This was the year that seemingly everything changed, save the postal codes of where you lived and where you worked. While it was happening you thought you might drown, but looking back, you’re more grateful than ever for the gentleness and renewed resilience that you acquired while stepping into a chapter you didn’t know could delight you so. 

It was a year of growing into your life, of coming home to yourself. A year of growing older, and all that accompanies that process. It was a year of clarity, lightness, complexity, weight, softness, sadness, dreams, closed doors, wisdom, curiosity, peace, love, and sorrows - all together making themselves at home in your life. 

The recovery of the pieces of who we are can take years. Sometimes they leave us for a while but then just like that, graciously return to us, and we encounter what I like to call “the me I’m supposed to be” all over again. That was this year for you. 

This was the year you dove headfirst into a project that you wouldn’t realize the fullness of for months. This was the year you carried yourself differently into advent - all softness, anticipation, coziness, and a search for light while welcoming dark. This was the year you rang in the new year with strangers and a suddenly wide awake plane somewhere over Ontario. At 10 seconds to midnight the pilot came onto the intercom to lead passengers in a countdown. It was the year you resolved to be brave. It was the year you learned to be grateful for this body of yours. It is, after all, home to a mind, a soul, a life. 

You visited Chicago for the first time to meet up with your twin, and you cried together at how cold winter was, how hard life can feel, and how opaque the future can seem. You went to NYC - your thin space, and place of return. To Montreal - just long enough to be loved by two enduring friends, and have lunch with a colleague who proudly shows you his photo on the wall of the diner where you had lunch. To England - which felt very strangely like coming home and also reminded you all over again why kindness, curiosity, and coziness are your personal ingredients for a life well lived. To France - all that way to sleep and sit and eat! But mostly to think and resolve - while sitting canal-side - that before you returned you would be “proud of the pivot.” To Toronto and Hamilton more times than you can count. You went camping too, snuggling under the wide-open Ontario sky. 

You hosted Thanksgiving dinner in a small flat in Toronto that you rented with a kindred spirit who flew in from Winnipeg. Everyone brought an item or two to share. They chopped and stirred, enjoying being together in person - a rare delight. Honest conversations, hilarious memories, competitive games; the kind of ribbing and teasing and all talking at once that can only come from knowing each other well and fully unfolded. You went the next day to the family of a friend, enjoying the front row seat and grace that is being welcomed into someone else’s most precious place. 

You attended weddings like they were going out of style. One in the Ukrainian-Greek Orthodox Church that is nothing like the places of worship you grew up with but is now full of memories and spirits very dear to you. One in Waterloo with your adoptive siblings where your “adoptive” older brother married the love of his life. You want to remember your eyes leaking alongside the groom’s through the first 3 verses of the hymn his sister and brother-in-law sang. You want to remember curling up alongside friends and family on benches in Mennonite country between the service and reception. You want to remember belly-laughing at your abject terror at being led out onto the dance floor. You want to remember you all singing them quietly with sparklers into the night and a new life. You want to remember the smell of roses in your hair and what newly married joy looks like. You want to remember what the deepest embodiment of “we do not walk alone” feels like. 

You attended - and were even in some - other weddings too. Perhaps the most tender memory for you is standing up alongside your roommate of almost five years as she married one of your oldest university friends. You want to remember bunking in her parent’s full house one last time, rolling out of bed again to choke back tears as friends from across the years did what they do best - reconvene in a place entirely new, and remind you of how fiercely you love them, despite any amount of time or distance between.

There were other celebrations of love too. The one of two of the kindest spirits you know where people kept whispering, “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world!” The one where you danced with the women and sang in a language not your own, remembering what it is to feel alive. The one where one of your former colleagues came all the way across the pond only to fall in love with the Cuban curate training at the parish down the road. 

You took planes, trains, and automobiles, even seaplanes, and a water taxi too. You got to do an epic feat of geographic overlap between kindred spirits at the Keats farm. You also got to revisit the Sunshine Coast for the second time this year - the first for an immediate family reunion and the second for an extended family reunion - an unbelievable reinstatement of a former tradition, recovered after an 8 year unintentional sabbatical. There was dancing and singing too.

You perfected the art of packing in small bags that could be wrestled in and out of taxis, ferries, small airplane seats, and backseats. You never forgot to bring your journal or a book. In fact, you travelled so much that you actually began to believe yourself when you said you were learning how to carry home with you, and embrace the art of being present to yourself and the people around you - even if the setting seemed to invariably change.

Your people loved you fiercer and better than ever. One of your best friends and her husband drove 8 hours to visit you the morning after a wedding to listen, cuddle, sing, and clear out your fridge with you as you cried on the edge of enormous change you knew you couldn’t even quite see. 

Old friends moved closer. You continued to delight in doing life both in person and at a distance with Les Filles of the Kitchen Collective. You continued to love being able to spot your crew in a crowd. Your adoptive brother stopped by while you were at work to fix your bike. You waited for babies and welcomed babies. You fell in love with the little ones brought earthside by your dear ones. 

You met your birthday buddy, and another gift of a friend’s heart on your way home for Christmas. Friends visited and shared how they were on the cusp of something new, and others whose courage and kindness co-mingled, make them an absolute privilege to know.  You celebrated your dear friend’s 35th birthday and the words “still cancer free” like they gave you a new lease on life.

Your family enfolded you. You fell in love with your cousins again. The tall, lanky one, the sweet one who knows the birthday gift you secretly wanted, the one who always remembers to call you, the youngest but now tallest one, the one who has matching eyes. Every last one of them.

You celebrated this kindred spirit and couldn’t imagine how successfully your lives would entwine over the year. You tried to love others well too - and sometimes that even meant getting roped into a Christmas market for great causes. You continued to have weekly calls with the one who travels in your pocket so faithfully and well. The one that can rightfully boast being the reason you haven’t entirely run from some new and surprising forms of love in your life.

Others were further afield and surprised you even more, such as the custodian at your work who tracked your cough for weeks and showed up at your office door one evening with a verbal list of homemade remedies to check that your coat and boots were warm, and once he had verified that you had been to the doctor, carried on his way. Or perhaps the neighbours (or Angels in disguise?) who gifted you free furniture and carried it right inside your front door to furnish your previously still quite empty room.  

Let’s not forget the neighbour who cleared the stairs in 30 seconds with a grin to get banana bread. Or your colleagues who forced you to eat lunch. And certainly not your favourite waiter who hugged your mentor and you as we left in joy of seeing us, and in relief at the words “cancer free.” Definitely not the former refugee who screamed with glee and hugged you in delight at running into you on the street. 

This year you found Holy Ground in the people of Matthew House who put you back together again, and grew the flame for justice right inside of you, over the crepes you frantically whipped up even when you showed up late thanks to bus delays and icy snow drifts,

This was the year you became convinced that one day in heaven they’ll be a roll call and all the folks who didn’t grow up making challah but tried to each week in order to slow down and choose Shabbat and rest and wrestled things through dough and hospitality will stand up to be accounted for. 

There were some very difficult bits too. While less joyful, they have shaped you just as much. You said goodbye to your beloved Nuccio. The man who taught you from the moment you were born that the truest measure of a human being is the degree of gentleness and humility with which they approach life; how they love when they think no one else is watching. You gave thanks, not for the first time, for the privilege of getting to be on the life team he created. Gentle is perhaps the word that showed up most often when you remembered him, and it left you determined to carry that word with you all your days. Some parts of your DNA you inherit. Others you choose. When it comes to gentleness, I hope it’s both.

You said goodbye to friends like K, who live with the determined love that has quite literally given some of you the life and the light you call yours today. In fact, five friends moved in the span of a summer to far-flung places in the globe - Egypt, Australia, Ireland, and Quebec City. And while the shape of their lives has already changed since the writing of this, that departure felt seismic, like something had come loose. 

You prepared to say goodbye to your buddy - your partner in crime who you did life with for almost five years. It was a sweet goodbye, but a goodbye none-the-less. 

There were a solid few months, non-consecutively where you felt you were completely lost in your own life. Thankfully, it didn’t last. 

There were some very wonderful bits too. This was a year of hunkering down, excavating your life and the nurturing of some things that are beautiful and new. You discovered the beauty of shoulder hours. You took a course on mediation. You stepped back from commitments. You learned to say no. You advocated for yourself. You sent something very big into the world and resolved that even asking the question was important. 

You cheered for a house that’s come to hold a piece of who you are in all the ways you know how. You voted and remembered instantly what a privilege that is. This puppy kept you smiling. Your father turned 60. You remembered what it is to celebrate often and well. You enjoyed the cat who made you laugh endlessly with her facial expressions. You went skating on the canal when E visited. 

You participated in all the delights of ordinary life. A succession of baby showers, baking, book sales, snack runs, book clubs, helping people move, dinners, drinks, out of town guests, volunteering, house repairs, and finally working through the backlog of emails. The ordinary bits, in particular, are the ones that you don’t want to forget. 

The library became a regular part of your commute. You celebrated publically decorated trees.

You were the recipient of love by mail. You lingered over sunny patios. You never want to forget the contours of winter, the winter that you revelled in and that gave you permission to be cozy away inside with your projects and books, to celebrate the warmth that can be inside despite the cold outside. You often show up late to church and end up sitting on the back left side but you’re settled that Jesus is in your bones and you won’t be leaving. 

You began to read voraciously again. You listened to a lot of podcasts. You discovered that you love evenings marked by tea and candlelight. You began cultivating the art of slowness, the art of the nap and afternoon coffee, evening conversation and bedtime reading. You chased flowers. Sometimes friends helped bring them straight to you. Your florist sister even brought you to the flower auction. You discovered that it truly is the small things that save us. You revelled in having people around your table - in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room. 

You fell in love with the ordinary people who make up the scaffolding of your neighbourhood. The barista who says sweetly, “for you, anything” while fetching a cord because your phone is dead. The waiter who pops up behind you to make you laugh in the grocery store and sweetly talks about love with you when your breakfast date is late, hugging you weeks later when you happen to find yourselves in the corner of the same pub. The seamstress that has saved you from disaster more than once.

You learned a lot of very important things this year. Firstly - and perhaps most importantly, you learned that there is exactly enough time for all the people and things you really prioritize in the world. Values are like blocks, stack them in such a way that reflects what you say you believe in an embodied, made-manifest kind of way and you will be surprised by who and what arrives almost right to your front door. 

You learned that tiny hints in the here and now, point to a God who makes all things new, who redeems and restores, and promises new wellsprings. You seem to be better attuned to the tiny, piecing them together as they point to the big.

You wrote in your journal, “My neighbour came around the corner only to discover me caught in the rain and promptly pulled out his umbrella to walk me back the way he’d come to my front door. My favourite waiter bent down to whisper a secret to me yesterday. I promised to pray. A friend kept me company while I did chores on the phone yesterday. These are the treasured moments of belonging that remind me of how much we need each other.“ And you began to see that there’s something in this: from stranger to familiar, from far to near, from fear to love.

Your eyes grew to see gentleness in its many forms. We see what we look for, after all. The construction worker who gently edged you away from a moving vehicle this morning. A colleague who knew just what to say. A phone call you didn’t know you needed. 

You have learned that dancing is an important piece of belonging to one another. I have a feeling you’ll look back at these years and be oh so grateful for the chance to be taught this beautiful piece of resiliency. Namely, that to stop and dance is to be free and fully alive.

This was the year you learned to “fasten your mask” before attempting to help others. You have learned - if grudgingly - to go to sleep before 11. You learned just how much you loved to laugh and have an appetite for mischief. You’ve learned that when push comes to shove, you needed to know that you weren’t going to be standing alone. You’ve learned that more than ever that you want to live according to W.H. Auden’s words: “If equal affection cannot be,/ Let the more loving one be me.” 

You will look back on your twenties as a time of precious, if hard-won growth. One of the gifts of this learning has been the realization that there are still friends left to make in the big wide world. 

This was the year that Catherine of Sienna followed you. This was the year that your heart for refugees grew three sizes. This was the year that you became awake to chapters of your story that you weren’t aware were already being written. 

You want to remember the words of your friend Danielle who prayed, “God thank you that you are a God of change and courage. A God of boundaries and gentleness.”

You’ve been struck lately - amidst the sea of change - by a deep affection for this space and this life you’ve been given to live. To taste and see and dwell and wonder in all of these extraordinary spaces seems tonight, like something I can’t be grateful enough for.