Trust the Freeze

Lessons from a bird on my patio.

On a crisp morning last week, I sipped my warm cup of coffee while Nat King Cole’s Autumn Leaves gently crooned from the speakers. My son was crawling around the living room and I had just let the dog out to the patio for some fresh air. Marveling at this little one-year-old person exploring his surroundings with such independence, I was lost in thought when all of a sudden I heard, *THUD!* — my head whipped to look at the window. “What was that?” I wondered, startled from focus.

I walked to the door to inspect the patio, where I found the culprit of the noise that made me jump. A dazed little finch had just flown into the window, and there it was completely stunned, standing frozen on the ground. I swooped up the dog and brought him inside to give the bird some space without the threat of being eaten and I went back to tending to my son.

After some play time, I peered out the patio door to check on the bird. To my surprise, it was still standing exactly as I first found it, frozen like a stone. I waved at it, gently spoke to it, briefly thought about picking it up and moving it, but decided to leave it be. One or two check-ins later, I came back and there it went…the bird was flying away on its own. It was airborne again, soaring somewhere, but it didn’t budge to attempt its next journey until it was fully recovered and ready to find its way back to flight.

Relieved, I didn’t think much more of the incident until I was running on the treadmill later that day. I was listening to my usual Broadway cardio mix (A FIVE-SIX-SEVEN-EIGHT!) and the song ‘Wait For It’ from Hamilton came on. I trotted, one foot in front of the other percussively pounding to Leslie Odom Jr. singing, “Wait for it, I am the one thing in life I can control; I am in-i-mi-ta-ble, I am an o-ri-gi-nal”…the rhythm revving up my thoughts like an engine crank as my mind flashed to the…*THUD!*

It hit me—for the past few months, as I’ve been adjusting to various shifts in my life, I’ve felt a lot like this bird. Watching it take its time to fly again after slamming into my patio door taught me a great lesson. So often, I think we try to push ourselves through twists and turns and new beginnings, rushing to make sense of changes as quickly as possible for the sake of looking and feeling like we’re moving forward, but the truth is…sometimes, you just have to allow yourself to “wait for it” a beat before you can get back up and fly again.

Someone recently told me that humans have three responses in a state of crisis: we either have the instinct to fight, flight….or freeze. I’ve been in fight mode for the past several years as I’ve been building my career. But in this season of what is possibly the greatest change of my life, becoming a mother, I seem to have the instinct to freeze as I continue to process and piece together a new normal for me and my family.

When I expressed frustration to my friend about this, she looked me in the eye and calmly said, “trust the freeze.” She assured me that this instinct is a gift if I am willing to honor it, and despite the mixed signals we get from society and people in our orbit, there is in fact time to pause and focus inward to find your own “inimitable” way forward from a period of time that has challenged you or changed your course. Whatever your instinct of survival (or sur-thrive-al) is when you’re put through life’s rollercoasters, simply allow yourself to trust it.