Hats

I’ve been thinking about hats lately:
The aunt hat I wear as I’m feeding my sister’s voraciously hungry teenagers
The secretary hat finding an arborist for my townhouse complex
The board member hat relaying information from Russia to California
The peer supporter hat prodding patients toward the next step of recovery
The social work hat putting together a school reentry program for a teen survivor
The writer hat editing and re-editing in the attempt to make a story work
The friend hat showing a new Portlander the delights of Oregon wine country
And the list goes on…

Cataloguing one’s hats makes for an interesting life debrief. Who we are isn’t what we do. But what we do conveys something of our identity. What we value. Or at least what we find to keep busy.

Mourning the missing hats comes and goes for me. Authenticity demands I at least try. Some hats don’t fit post-injury like they would have pre. Some seem far out of my reach. But setbacks and struggles can be dream killers only if we let them.

My Russian friends Kostya and Ella are pictured above next to a statue of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935). He was a rocket scientist at the turn of the last century, one of the pioneers of astronautic theory. And known as sort of an odd dreamer in his small town of Kaluga. I’m sure his ideas seemed pretty far-fetched to everyone around him.

The hat he wanted to wear at the time didn’t really fit. But that didn’t stop him from working on his dreams. Give anything enough time, energy and diligence, and who knows what could be launched…