Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Well, folks, it’s been a wild week.

I’ve been off on spring break and away enjoying a lovely family vacation and I have since learned that New Jersey apparently falls to pieces when I am not there to hold it together.

There were at least 3 straight days of rain with damaging winds.

A tree fell in my brother’s yard and somehow managed to miss his house and his car, but took down a bunch of power lines.

The rain only stopped long enough for it to snow in April.

And just when the weather decided to clear up, there was a magnitude 4.8 earthquake…

YES…an EARTHQUAKE in NEW JERSEY!

(By the way…step back, New York. You can’t claim this one too! Let us have our earthquake, okay?)

Oh yeah…and a solar eclipse is coming on Monday. WHEEE!!!!

All of this excitement led me to have a conversation with some friends about how crazy I expect Monday to be at my job as an elementary school teacher.

Now, I was never a person who put much stock into the idea that the full moon or planetary alignment had any effect whatsoever on the behavior of students until I began teaching.

Let me tell you something: that shit’s REAL, and it’s WILD.

Any teacher of young children will tell you that the full moon is powerful! Not only do we dread the full moon when we know it’s arriving, but like clockwork if a series of really bazaar behaviors happen during the school day you can ask Google if it’s a full moon and pretty much bet your entire lifetime salary that the answer is going to be “yes!”

So, while I know the solar eclipse isn’t actually going to bring on the apocalypse (it’s really not…so everyone please calm down!) I am a MILLION percent convinced that Monday will be wild after a week of spring break, an earthquake and several aftershocks, the children not being able to release their energy by running around outdoors all week, and the fact that we are supposed to keep the kids inside all day so they don’t burn their retinas staring at the sun.

So, yes, a lovely conversation erupted about the joys of Jupiter being in Gatorade…or Mercury being in the microwave…or Mercury being in retrograde, or whatever it is one says when life gets crazy, and my most amazingly (self-described) woo-woo friend asked if we’d like her to step on her soapbox and school us all a bit about blaming all of life’s problems on planetary alignment.

That’s always a hard yes from me.

According to this brilliant glitter goth, when we expect bad things to happen, we are actively inviting bad things to happen, and that’s on us, not on the moon, or Mercury, or any other celestial bodies we want to blame it on.

So, instead of filling ourselves with existential dread and accepting that our day, week, month, or year will be crazy, we can instead  shift our perspective  and  choose  to view this as a fulfilling time to let go of things, energy, or people who are no longer serving us.

There are always going to be circumstances that we  cannot  control, but we  can  control how we  choose  to react to them.

The Full Moon, Mercury in retrograde, dealing with that one super extra friend or family member, and any other situation that you know is going to be explosive and wild…maybe these are not examples of the universe trying to push us to our limits. Maybe, these are ways that the universe is inviting us to take a closer look at the things that explode in our lives and show us that these are not the things/people/places/experiences that serve us.

Maybe it’s time to let that shit go.

Letting go can, of course, be painful. It’s perfectly normal to feel your feelings. Vent to your friends. Eat a gallon of ice cream. Scream. Cry. Do what you’ve got to do, and when you are done, take a step back and find the silver lining.

How am I going to digest this advice and (try to) follow it this coming week? I certainly can’t “let go” of my students and take an extra week of vacation. Even if this were an option, it would just delay the inevitable, and pile on a bunch of extra work and stress to the following week. Instead, I’m going to try to let go of the idea that things will get out of hand, and also let go of a little bit of control.

Am I going to let chaos reign? No. (Well, maybe 😈) But I am going to accept the fact that the solar eclipse is a relatively rare event that even I have been excited about since the eclipse in 2017, the earthquake was an event that was probably a first for 99% of the school population, and that the first day back after a break is always a bit rough. Maybe the universe is telling me to ease back into the school routine and take some time to form connections with my students over the absolute absurdity of the circumstances we have found ourselves in this past week.

So, my sweet friends, when life gives you lemons, earthquakes, full moons, and eclipses, make a delicious chaos lemonade a take a nice sip.

Breathe lots of love in. Exhale lots of bad juju out…and let that shit go.

Namaste.

From https://medium.com/project-rollplay/changeyour-perspective-and-let-that-shit-go-7847f536ff49