"Be gentle with yourself..."

That's what a friend told me recently - to be gentle with myself. He said this after I had told him about my particularly difficult week - a draining week, one that zapped me almost completely. "Be gentle with yourself," said this friend, who knows me well enough to know that I am (like many), my own harshest critic.

So, here's a problem: it's harder for me to be gentle with myself when it feels like life is beating the crap out of me. When there's anxiety around almost every corner - in so many worried eyes and concerned hearts.

But, here's some good news: I have wonderful friends. I mean, wonderful. This friend's beautiful words of encouragement came as I was packing to travel to visit some of my wonderful friends over my days off. On a whim. Just...because. Because I needed to be wrapped up in the particular love of these particular friends, and let them enfold me. And enfold me they did.

I felt my energy returning on my drive to their house. I blared Bach and Beethoven and Sting and conducted or sang the whole trip. I only cussed at the other drivers a little bit. I felt like I did the summer that I was seventeen, in my Granny's Buick, on my first solo road trip - free, free, free.

I arrived into the arms of my friends, welcomed by plans of dinner and conversation. Welcomed by a lack of agenda the next morning. Welcomed by both their gentleness and their laughter. And I remembered again how to be gentle with myself.

Sometimes being gentle with ourselves is so. very. hard. But if it's one thing I've learned, it's that when I am gentle with myself, I'm somehow more gentle with others, too. And I really do think that more gentleness in the world is a pretty good thing.

So, thank you, friends, for loving me back into gentleness.