Twenty one days

Hello friend,

Twenty one days ago I sent you the first one, on my birthday, and asked you to come with me.

And if you were not coming with me, twenty one emails from the same woman is a lot to find in your inbox before breakfast. I know. Thank you for not unsubscribing out of spite. Daily is not something I plan to make a habit of, and we are back to Monday mornings from here.

You came. A lot of you did the days as they landed and told me about it. Others have told me you saved every email and you are going to run your own twenty one days when the timing is yours. Do it in January. Do it the week the house finally goes quiet.

All twenty one reels are still up on my Instagram and Facebook if you want to go back through them, at @karen_amy__

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WHAT IT DID TO ME

I built this. I have taken clients through something very close to it, and I have done it myself at different points in my life. Building a thing and doing the thing are not the same, and this time it landed differently.

Since the move to Guelph I have not found my full groove. I started The Crone Stories and I love it. I left private practice and I am still working out how what I know translates into whatever this is becoming. Running my own twenty one days landed at a better time than I planned.

I have always joked that I could never properly live in the country, because I am a natural hermit and I would simply never leave the house. Solitude is easy for me. Too much of it is not good for me. I know the difference and I still drift.

So. I started leaving the house after five o'clock. The last time I regularly went out after dinner I was in a church choir in Collingwood. That was years ago.

And I went to the gym nearly every one of the twenty one days.

The four rhythm pieces I ask of you are things I already do. The pages, the quiet in the morning, the moving. The hard one for me is the ten minutes at night, when the whole day wants to run itself past me one more time.

I am an end goal person. Savouring is not natural to me. Pleasure is something I have to deliberately think my way into, because I have been pointed at outcomes for most of my life. These twenty one days taught me how much is sitting in the journey, and how luxurious the journey is once you are slow enough to be in it.

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SOME OF THIS I SORTED OUT LONG AGO

I had been a mother since I was twenty one. By my early forties I decided that if this cup was going to be filled, I was the one who had to fill it. I walked the Camino for six weeks. I did ten days of silence where nobody could reach me. I did a four week yoga training. Every one of those meant leaving my home for weeks at a stretch.

I used to get a particular response from women. I wish I could do that. Your husband must be so supportive. It was never about that. It was a decision I made. My husband is supportive, and I would not be in a marriage with a man who was not. When I stepped out, he took the lead at home. That is his job.

What these twenty one days showed me is where I had let things slack anyway. Not the big decisions. The small ones. The things I enjoy that I had quietly made too difficult.

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DOLLY

Dolly Parton died this week.

She spent eighty years being exactly who she was. The hair, the nails, the rhinestones, the jokes she made about all of it before anyone else could. She never filed the edges off to make herself easier for a room, and she never once asked permission.

And underneath the sparkle she gave nearly everything away. Books to children who had none. A hospital. Research money. She lived it out loud and she handed it out with both hands.

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WHAT I HOPE

I am not there yet. That is the goal.

And it is the same thing I have been asking of you for twenty one days.

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We do not all shift the same way.

Some of you are struggling financially. Some emotionally. Some in ways you have not told anybody. The struggles look different and they arrive at the door differently, and underneath they are all human.

My hope is that somewhere in these twenty one days you got hold of something. That if you have been the supporting character in your own life, you found one thing that makes you the leading lady. One is enough to start.

There is so much love coming your way from me.

I am in transition, from private practice to whatever this is turning into. Stay on the road with me. And if these letters gave you something, send them to a woman who needs them.

In love, light and laughter,

Karen

The life we don't examine stays the life we didn't choose

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