there's this coping technique called "riding the wave" that my clients use to...well, cope -- with anything from being frustrated that they can't have seconds at dinner to having flashbacks of past traumas. and every night, they sit in a big circle and tell each other the coping skills that they've used that day. there are self-explanatory ones like deep breathing, and idiosyncratic ones like "making lemonade (out of lemons)" and "turtling (rolling with it)." but i like "riding the wave" the best because it speaks of the inconstant and cyclical nature of almost everything. the only constant in life is change. everything that goes down must come up again, like a wave. everything that we pass through is just a phase, a season. it also reminds me of what liz gilbert said of meditaion and buddhist philosophy in Eat, Pray, Love:

"In our real lives, we are constantly hopping around to adjust
ourselves around discomfort -- physical, emotional and psychological -- in
order to evade the reality of grief and nuisance. Vipassana meditation
teaches that grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life, but if you plant
yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth
that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass. 'The
world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve,
knowing the terms of the world,' says an old Buddhist teaching."

and that is one of the reasons i chose to come here. to discover how to be still with myself for a little while, to stop running away from the "bad me," to just ride the wave through all the different colors and shades of me until they've all made peace with each other, or at least until they've all learned how to make peace. i just figured it would be a little bit easier to do so among these (deceivingly) still mountains and waters than a city that never sleeps, for example.