there’s room for it all

t h e r e ' s r o o m f o r i t a l l

WORDS: ANNIE GEBEL

A few decades ago I got married and moved from New York state to Washington state a month after graduating from college. It was a lot. There were a lot of emotions to sift through. Many tears were shed. So much laughter was shared. There was room for all of my emotions, feelings, struggles, and joys.

Thank goodness, right?! Can you imagine how much more difficult that whole process would have been if I couldn’t mourn the fact that one of my best friends couldn’t be at my wedding because she couldn’t get leave from the Army while being so excited that her mother was making my dress? What about the emotions of our wedding day itself, when my little sister and my college friends laid in the grass and shared how much they’d miss me and how happy they were that I was marrying this man I loved and starting our own adventure together? That certainly helped them process sadness and joy all at the same time.

I remember a similar working through of grief and happiness when family members have passed away. Looking through pictures, sharing memories, smiling through tears.

Holding the extremes in life isn’t reserved just for weddings and funerals, though. It might seem like it because those are two emotionally charged events that present very real opportunities for us to embrace the extremes. If we look, though, there are chances daily to feel the good and the bad, the heavy and the light. And for some reason, this time of year speaks to me as a really great time to feel it all!

I think it’s because in the fall we harvest what has grown and watch fields die. There’s a beautiful balance to it, especially in the way the trees change and release, preparing to rest. Nature, as always, leads us by example. Following her lead, we can find joy in pumpkin spice, apples and cinnamon, and warm mugs of hot drinks. At the same time we settle down from all the fun of summer - camping, rafting, all the s’mores - and find the routine that comes with school, sports, and cooler weather. I know people that love the summer and are sad to see it go and those who are more excited for sweaters and hayrides than sunny beaches and umbrella drinks. And there’s room for all those feelings.

"It's life to have really hard days and really great moments"

I think the holidays of fall also lend themselves to this idea of feeling in different directions at the same time. Halloween is a holiday that offers fun for kids and kids at heart as well as scares of every size! (For the record, I’m on the no scare, lots of fun part of the Halloween scale!) Among all the ghosts we see, we might even connect with the spirits of our ancestors - remembering and celebrating them. This is part of the celebration of Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, which takes place right after Halloween. And I remember celebrating All Hallow’s Eve in church growing up, when we learned about the saints. And any time you’re connecting with those who’ve passed before you, there are unanswered questions and things left unsaid (or maybe just conversations you’d like to have if you could sit down with St. Francis or St. Margaret or Saint anyone else). And those things lend themselves to both heartache and comfort.

So, why is this something to recognize and talk about? Because it’s life. It’s life to have really hard days and really great moments. Living with extremes is easy to see when those extremes are, well, extreme - such as getting married and moving thousands of miles away from everyone you know. Truth be told, though, we do it every day in all sorts of little ways too.

Sometimes when I’m driving and have to go slow behind someone and get annoyed by it, I see a deer eating or a hawk flying and am reminded to enjoy the simple things in life. Sometimes when the kids were little, they’d throw a fit and I’d want to yell, but they’d also be really darn cute and I’d remember to literally embrace and love on them. Sometimes in the hectic day to day I notice the laundry that’s never done, the food that always needs cooking, the floors that don’t vacuum themselves and get overwhelmed, but also find time for a nap or a movie or a chat with a friend and remember that there are reasons to smile. We have extremes all throughout our lives. Differences help us notice the opposite and appreciate the joys even more. Take a moment and be thankful for that.

Another reason it’s important to remember that there is room for it all, but sometimes it’s hard to see it. When you’re feeling the happy or the sad, the devastating or the blissful, it’s easy to feel like you’ll be stuck in the muck forever or not want to come down from the high. In these moments, especially, it can be uber helpful to remember that there is, in fact, room. For it all.

If you just got married and are fully head over heels in love, living on cloud nine, and all the other cliches and a friend confides her marriage struggles to you, it’s really nice to be able to hold all those emotions. If you’re the friend confiding her struggles with painful tears in your eyes to the friend who is all doe-eyed, it’s also really nice to be able to hold all those emotions.

The same can be said with fertility issues and pregnancies, job losses and promotions, or any number of big ticket life situations. It’s probably important to note that the same set of circumstances can impact people differently too... and there’s room for that as well. A recent example of that is COVID and all that it brought upon us. Some worked more, some lost jobs. Some homeschooled their kids for the first time and loved it, some didn’t. Some worked from home and want to keep it that way, others can’t wait to go back to an office. All the extremes and everything in between and there’s room for it all!

So, I guess the biggest reason of all to write about this topic is that we live and exist with and around extremes - everything from differences of opinions to differences of experiences. We can live in discord and hold ourselves back from sharing our feelings and sharing in others. That’s one option. Or we can try to find a certain harmony that comes from opening a space that allows for your joy and your pain, their pain and their joy. Perhaps, this time of year encourages that harmony because it lends itself to the perfect background noises - like children jumping in piles of leaves or screaming at scary movies. Maybe it’s fall is about impermancy and that can help us realize that the pain will change over time and the joy won’t last forever. Maybe it’s because we’ll soon settle into processing all the things from the previous year, hibernation, and getting ready to do it all again in 2022.

Whatever the reason, whatever you’re feeling, expressing, or living with - there is room for all the emotions to be felt fully. The seasons themselves support you in this. Embrace the extremes.