I Forgot to Notice the Water

In January, I wrote about Cassidy. About honouring her memory through a Year of Resilience. I had a clear vision of what that would look like by the end of the first quarter. A man transformed. Waking at 05:00, strong, bulging muscles, a clear mind, my routines humming like a well-oiled machine. I would have moved mountains at work. I would be writing prolifically, exercising daily, sleeping long and deeply. I would radiate the quiet, purposeful energy of someone who had taken his grief and alchemised it into gold.

Spoiler alert: this is not what happened.

I am writing these words at the end of March, and I am exhausted. A period of intense travel and transition has left my routines in pieces. My sleep is broken, with screens still glowing late at night, mornings arriving before I'm ready, and my body heavy with a fatigue that shrugs off any amount of coffee I throw at it.

The to-do list I carry over every day has 40+ items on it, many of them urgent. I am not on top of things. I am under their boot. Work has always been relentless, but in recent months the volume has surged beyond anything I've known. Where once I could at least see the full landscape and know what needed doing even if I couldn't do it all, now I am juggling so many things that balls drop before I notice they were in the air.

I spend a lot of time alone, away from my family. I miss my wife, who is my anchor. I carry the weight of not being there for family going through their own difficult time, a helplessness that distance makes heavier. And last week, something happened that sent me into a spiral I hadn't felt in a long time: a narrowing of inner vision, as though the world had contracted to a pinpoint of fear and frustration. I felt small. Crushed. My body held the tension like a clenched fist. I did push-ups until my arms burned, because the pressure had to go somewhere and I knew that I needed a constructive way to release it.

Apparently, this is what resilience actually looks like. Not a warrior holding his ground, a smile on his face as his blade slices through his enemies. No. It's a man doing push-ups on a floor, alone, trying to shake loose the weight of the boot grinding him into the ground.

I named this year after Cassidy because she taught me about resilience. But what she actually modelled wasn't endurance under pressure. It was presence inside difficulty. She lived with chronic illness for fifteen years and never once seemed to be merely surviving. She was fully there, alert, stubborn, alive in every moment she had. And here I am, three months into the year I dedicated to her memory, and presence is the very thing I've let slip through my fingers. I have been so busy keeping my head above water that I forgot to notice the water.

There is one thing, though, that I almost hesitate to call a win because the word feels too clean for what it is. I have started writing fiction. For years I dreamed of it, and now, in the middle of the intensity, stories have begun forming. Not because the conditions were right, but because something in me recognised that if I didn't feed the creative part of myself, I would lose myself. The fiction is not escape. It is driftwood. It is the thing I hold onto so that the current doesn't take everything.

And I reach for small acts of repair. Five minutes of breathwork between meetings, a few rounds of yoga when my body screams for stillness, a few moments before my day starts, soaking in the morning sun. These are not the disciplined routines I imagined. They are survival measures, pockets of presence stolen from the chaos. But maybe that is what resilience looks like when it's real and not imagined. Not a pristine morning routine. Not a conquering spirit. Just the persistent, stubborn refusal to let the flood take everything that matters.

I don't have a neat ending for this. I am not writing from the other side. I am writing from inside it. Still tired, still behind, still figuring it out. The version of me I expected to be by now does not yet exist. The version that showed up instead is messier, less impressive, and more honest than anything I could have planned.

Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps the fact that I stopped long enough to write this, to see myself clearly for the first time in months, is its own act of presence. The kind Cassidy would have recognised.

I'm still in it. I'm still here. And that's what matters.

Until next time,

Ric.