Literally. One of the things the proverbial “they” advise you to do afterwards is to be prepared for aftershock. At 6am this morning we were all woken up by another one of those unwelcome natural happenings. Although, at 6am nothing feels ‘natural’ about it.

It was a mid-scale quake that lasted about 4-6 seconds. Yes, a LONG 4-6 seconds. In that amount of time I woke up Husband, we both jumped out of bed and just waited. We waited for those final 2-3 seconds to see if we needed to get J from his crib. Of course he had been woken by the shifting ground as well. We, however, had the earth beneath us settle again, got our heart rates back to normal, and I fed Jesse his milk before getting him to sleep for another hour and some.

Literal earth-shaking…. It unnerves you, it causes you to lose your balance, it sparks an instant fear, it triggers the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, it leaves you a little paranoid for a few moments, and it brings a flood of “Why did we chose to live HERE?”

Then, not much different from the literal, we experience the figurative, or maybe it is better suited with the term ‘metaphorical’ quakes. Those unexpected moments, happenings, conversations that leave the exact same feelings as when literally everything around you is shaking out of your control.

When making the choice to leave family, friends, home…. we are indirectly asking for those quakes to happen. I (we) left home knowing that my #1 mentor was facing the uncertainty of cancer results/recurrence, we left home knowing that our grandparents were heading towards, living in, and passing by their 80s…. we knew that stress, accidents, deaths, uncertainties, change, unknowns would pop up in their 4-6 seconds of utter shock, disappointment, sadness, and so on. But what about after?

Simply put, our day continues. After a few hours things are seemingly normal, routine gets back on track, the work continues, husband leave town for the night, J and I watch happy Sesame Street songs, we pray a lot, and time passes. We make sure we talk with Family because that brings another calm, we look around and are happy with what we have, where we are, who we are with.

And then we realize something beautiful. We realize that we have been built with a certain amount of natural (and a whole lot of supernatural) resilience to overcome, to press on, to stay! So that is what we do. We stay.