I like a good drink.

It’s in my bio—my love of hoppy beer.

I also love a glass of wine after a long day and a shot of tequila on a Saturday afternoon.

But I’m pregnant. I can’t drink. Truthfully, my husband’s pints of hoppy ales make my stomach turn—and the smell of wine, just forget it.

So, last week when I had a horribly shitty day and my obvious end-of-a-bad-day/beginning-of-a-great-evening solution would have been an extremely generous glass of wine, I was left with, what the hell do I do with myself?

What do I do with my frazzled nerves and my overwhelmed heart and my tear-hair-out monkey mind?

I went to yoga class.

I walked in at 6:15 for the next class that evening and the studio manager sitting at the front desk was absolutely shocked to see me. Because I don’t take night classes.

No, at night I hole up with my family and cook and read books to my child and talk with my husband over stirring pots of yumminess on the stovetop—I do many things, but going to yoga class isn’t one of them.

But I’ve found this whole new me within my pregnant self—within this self who doesn’t drink alcohol—and I like her.

To be fair, I’ve been an emotional mess throughout this pregnancy.

My hormones have not been kind to my sensitive feelings and life didn’t get the memo that it was supposed to go easy on the pregnant lady. Actually, these last few months have been some of the most stressful of my life, and alcohol was not going to be there to help see me through it. Thank God.

Seriously, I just told my husband the other night—when I’m nearly positive that he wished I could drink—that I felt so blessed to have been forced through this intensely troublesome period of time without the convenience of drinking my beloved beer of choice (Hop Devil IPA, from where I used to live, if you really want to know).

It’s reminded me that even though I easily get anxious and even though life isn’t always fair in the amount of stressors it hands out at a time, I’m capable of breathing into and through life—just me, no alcohol necessary.

And I can honestly say that I’m sure I’ll have a beer or two periodically after my baby is born, but that I genuinely do plan on turning down alcohol more often than not.

Because that yoga class I took the other day, at 6:30 at night? It felt awesome—I felt awesome.

And I like me, even on my freaked-out-at-life days and especially when I could use a drink—because that’s the me who has some things to learn, things like patience and acceptance, surrender and how to practice real yoga.

And my real yoga begins when I walk out of that studio door and I get into my car and I’m forced to inhale and exhale and just experience my life.

And sometimes having a few glasses of wine while cooking dinner helps, but, more often, I only wake up thirsty at night and still have the same damn problems in the morning.

So I’m taking a pregnant pause to slow down and breathe into my life instead of glossing over it and, sure, some moments are better than others, but I want to be present for all of it.

Because if I hadn’t had that difficult day yesterday that caused loud tears to spill down my cheeks, then I wouldn’t have had my little girl come up to me and, being extra silly, make me laugh to cheer me up.

In life, we have bad times, but there’s nearly always good right there with it, if we can open our teary eyes enough to witness it.

And maybe for you it’s not alcohol but exercise (I’ve certainly run miles of life’s challenges away in my past too) or sex or something else that temporarily numbs our human experiences.

But what if, for one evening, we all paused before going into auto-pilot and chose a different way to deal with life?

What if for one day we chose to feel it all and breathe into the pain and into the joy and we stayed present, no matter how hard it was?

Well, maybe, we would find ourselves doing that the next night too, because life was actually easier when we dealt head-on with our burdens and emotions and thoughts.

And maybe every day could just be living our lives—loving our lives and ourselves—one breath, one moment at a time.

Photo: Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr.

This article first appeared on elephant journal.

The post What Happened When I Took a Breath Instead of a Drink. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

My shoulders settle down my back and my heart lifts at the clickity-clack sound of my fingers dancing across my laptop.

My ring turns on my right hand, so that the family heirloom diamonds point down and towards the softer skin of my palm. I twirl it back into place with my pinkie but it slips back and I don’t care.

I feel my head settle down and into my heart space as I anticipate purging myself through words.

Sometimes life requires purging. 

I sink into my chair with my tall spine jetting up towards the sky; my posture only slightly slumped at my tired shoulders, but it’s more of a softening and a giving in to my need to write and open up than a wilting droop.

Because sometimes life makes me want to envelop myself in bedsheets and tears and drown myself in slow, steady-thumping music as my chosen backdrop.

And then I’m driving down the windy road and feeling this need to blast the music too loudly for the little girl safely nestled in a carseat behind me.

I want to roll down the windows and feel every ounce of wind that I can across my flying, tangled hair and I want to drive off, away from the rising sun, towards a place that awaits in the shadows; calmer, gentler than the life of my past few weeks.

But I can’t.

I learned a long time ago that we cannot run away from our problems or from ourselves and that this only serves to prolong inevitable discomfort.

So I keep the music at a more moderate level and tell my daughter in the backseat that I love her.

I place my hands consciously at ten o’clock and two o’clock and drive to the yoga studio to drop off a few more copies of my just-released book and then to our local eyeglass shop instead of towards some imaginary oasis of pure fun and end-of-summer laughter.

But how do I eradicate my tensions and my stresses, and my over-filled life, when I no longer want to run my feet into splints or starve myself sick or drink too much wine while cooking dinner?

How do I become clean and new in my skin—right now—and my heart and my over-worked brain? 

The shower I took kind of worked.

I let the water wash over me as I quickly rinsed off, and I felt a little bit lighter in my stuck emotions as I toweled off my  dripping hair.

And that long, deep drink of water felt nice.

The soft feel of it on my tongue and the releasing it brought to my dry throat made the center of my chest soften just a touch.

But these are temporary fixes—just like alcohol and pounding the pavement.

Sure, there are long-term benefits to appropriate exercise and I’m not one to diminish the joys of moderate drinking either, but, still, when I go to bed tonight my problems will still be there and their weight will not have lessened.

So I’ll open up a book, after turning on just enough light to read by; holding the loved, worn pages up to my nose as I transport myself out of my bedroom.

I’ll let my eyes droop for too long until I finally admit that I need to flip off the light and, putting my book to the side, finally curl up under my bedsheets.

I’ll will my pre-slumber thoughts to be positive—things that conjure my gratitude and my love for my inhabited human skin—as I feel the way that my body tingles right before I fall asleep.

And maybe I’ll remember a few of my black-and-white dreams or maybe I’ll get up once or twice to use the bathroom, but when I wake, in the soft grey light of my bedroom, I’ll have a split moment in time before the sleepy fog clears and my mind once again turns to my everyday reality, and in that instance I’ll have purged myself of my yesterday.

So maybe, sometimes, we can’t do much to move forward from our troubles.

Instead, we dig in our heels and feel it all and hold the people we love tightly.

We let tears fall and we do, from time to time, roll all the windows down in the car and turn the music up too much.

And we acknowledge that tomorrow will be different from today, even if we don’t purposefully seek out this change. 

We recognize, too, that our daily choices of health and joy help attract these things back into our lives, but, equally, we understand that life is often beyond the control of our own two hands (no matter how well placed at ten o’clock and two o’clock).

I notice that my diamond stones—the ones that even my great-great grandfather wore—are once again perched on the top of my finger, and I honestly don’t know if they rolled back on their own or if I unconsciously shifted them back there while my fingers danced.

I observe, too, how my shoulders round a little bit more and, glancing at the time, I note my readiness for the evening to be enclosed in darkness.

And I tell myself that tomorrow will rise up new and clean and pure from today’s ashes, simply by my continuing to put one foot in front of the next.

Because sometimes that’s all we can do.

This article was first published by elephant journal.

Photo: João Lavinha/Flickr.

The post When All We Can Do Is Keep Walking. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

Saturday rolls around and it’s easy to get caught up in the mental scan of household chores and family needs.

But it’s important to consider that weekends are for more than grocery store trips and lawn care.

I remember waking up as a kid on Saturday morning and being allowed to spend these early day hours in favorite, cozy pajamas watching my favorite shows. It was special.

I’m sure my parents cut the grass, weeded the garden and cleaned the house, but that’s not what stuck with me.

What stuck with me was the family hikes on local trails, playing in the backyard and family meals, which is exactly why even as an adult I’m careful to not let my brain become overloaded with what my adult self wants to accomplish come the two adjoining days that many of us have off.

And life is not a to-do list.

We’re so willing to check things off an imaginary societal list of ordinary accomplishments.

Graduate high school, check.

Go to college, check.

Move out on your own for the first time, check.

Graduate college (many years after you initially started), check.

Get married…have kids…blah, blah, blah.

And when someone doesn’t coincide with these essentially made-up expectations, we question their societal worth and placement or encourage them strongly to fit back into line; to keep checking off this list.

Yet here’s my thought on this particular Sunday morning, where I sit typing at my nicked, antique wooden table, with my daughter and her favorite cartoon in the background and my husband on a mountain bike ride:

What if we threw away our to-do lists?

What if we pretended that each day was something to just be in awe of?

What would happen if every morning became a fresh start towards who we want to be and a new beginning of potentially the best day of our lives?

And, yes, we’ll weed the gardens and mow the lawns. We’ll clean the dust off our bookshelves too. But we’ll also not pretend that this is what life is about, because it’s not.

They say that people on their death beds rarely wish they’d worked more or accomplished that one nagging task. Instead, they wish they’d spent more time with their children or opened sheltered hearts to love with more willingness.

But life is hard.

It’s filled with things that need to get done and sometimes, unexpectedly, shit happens. At the same time, though, we possess the internal ability to simply shift perspective and, often, it’s this little, teensy tiny inner transition that makes huge life changes.

I wake up and yawn and stretch through my toes and roll over to my side. I grab my glasses lying nearby and wait until my daughter wakes up so that I can see her sparkly eyes and good-morning smile. And while I know that our day will have errands and things that I need to do, I don’t focus all of my energy this way. Rather, I borrow her wonder-filled, childlike mindset that enables her to see these every-day routines as fun and part of something much larger and not, incorrectly, a mundane reality.

I hate doing the dishes.

Yet when I ask my daughter to help me with them, every single time I’m rinsing off the last wine glass and singing one final round of The Wheels on the Bus and wondering how it all got done so quickly.

And, no, I’m not suggesting that we ignore our chores or even our societal check lists (I’m glad, for example, that I got married and had kids). But I’m not going to pretend that all I want out of my life is a clean house and short grass.

Maybe that’s why we have the prevalent midlife-crisis syndrome.

We spend so much of our lives climbing monetary ladders and putting checks next to arbitrary accomplishments that we forget to listen to beating hearts and to feed the fires that ultimately fuel us for longevity.

So, today, I’m checking “love passionately” off of my to-do list. Yep, done.

I’m also putting an imaginary mark next to “watch favorite cartoons.”

And as I hit “save” and prepare to more officially begin my Sunday morning, I’m walking into the next several hours with an open heart and mind, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll even have some fun doing the laundry (if it gets done, that is).

Photo: Anna Gutermuth/Flickr

This article was first published by elephant journal.

The post Life is Not a To-Do List. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.