This is not the week for that. I’m prepping for a road trip. There are lists and superseding lists spread across my kitchen countertops. Random piles of supplies are staged in different areas of the house, waiting for me to figure out the most efficient way to pack them into my Prius. Add to the mix our five-year-old granddaughter, come to stay for a few days. Toys, art supplies, and books have joined the cacophony. There’s an air-mattress on my bedroom floor piled high with enough stuffed buddies to populate a pre-school class. A visit with Charlotte is laced with wonderful question after question and a great deal of interactive play. It’s the very best kind of exhausting.

This is just another phase of my life. I’ve always been busy. There have always been things to do, tasks to complete, schedules to juggle. The cast of characters and needs may change, but I’ve always been more of a verb than a noun.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction, she needs (among other things) a room of her own, uninterrupted space to not only create but to think. I would expand that: in order for a woman to navigate the demands of a hectic life, she needs a place of her own to not only create and think, but to simply BE. The space can be tiny. Sometimes, it’s by necessity carved out of a bigger room. But it needs to be wholly hers, arranged as she needs to inspire clarity amidst the whirlwind outside its boundaries.

It took a long time for me to admit that I sometimes require a moment (or twenty) to recalibrate. We’re programmed to keep going. It feels like weakness to need a breather, however brief. But energy can’t continually pour out without providing an opportunity for it to refill.

I do have a space of my own. It probably speaks only to me, but that’s all it has to do. It’s my island of calm, my place to take a deep breath, gather my thoughts, and remember who I mean to be.

The most effective re-fuel allows you to bring your best to the world once you re-emerge into it. I’m not always good at that. I have to be careful to use my space for renewal rather than escape. But I’m a work-in-progress and a huge fan of tiny fresh starts.

Like now. It’s time to leave this room, assess all the moving pieces, and add my own unique energy to the constantly shifting mosaic that is life.

All the noise provides a good excuse to skip meditation. Whenever I do attempt it, I spend way too much time stuffing the voices away, clamping them back into whichever box they escaped from as I try to achieve pure silence.

Doing that is pretty much anti-meditation. Trying to quiet everyone down only adds to the stress I’m looking to overcome. I’m defeated before I even begin.

I’ve always thought that because I’m incapable of achieving completely silent headspace, I’m no good at meditating. But the original definition of meditation (as derived from Latin) focused on contemplation and reflection rather than on emptying the mind. Required letting go came later.

Apparently, there’s more than one way to approach a meditative state.

Lately, I’ve started letting everyone have their say. Without me stifling them, words flow through my mind and upward, released into the stratosphere. Some phrases are nonsense, word soup strung together in non-sequiturs that don’t make sense. Sometimes, images appear after the words float away. They don’t always make sense, either. Why do I often see a neighborhood I never lived in and only briefly knew? Why am I sometimes in an alternate future that might have been but never was?

“Making sense” is relative. Maybe the trick isn’t to muffle the sounds and sights that pass through my mind, but rather to hear and see them. The frazzled, busy ones tend to dissipate, curling upward like wisps of smoke. The more resonant ones stick around, even out, invite me to stay with them for a while. I think of them as guides meant to lead me through memories and issues that still need resolution.

Finding my peace may be less dependent on stashing thoughts away than on understanding them more completely. Once I better understand a presented situation or examine a lurking fear, the nagging tends to go away (at least for the moment — my concerns can be very tenacious).

I’m grateful for however I find my peace. Inward focus helps me cope with the cacophony of the outside world, where the noise can out-blab anything my own mind produces. I need all the centering I can get to keep my balance there.