In the past 3 weeks, I’ve driven three different cars, none of which belong to me. This is the gift of losing something: into empty space slides kindness. Friends who bring meals, friends who share their spare or not-so-spare car until you piece together what’s next.
My insurance company sent an email with the subject “Total Loss.” I laughed. How did they know? You would never know by looking at me that I’m losing a lot, but I am. I’m becoming half a life. In my half-sleep, I ask: will I become half a person? Will I become a ghost, disembodied from the future I thought I’d have, the safety for which I lost some of myself? Now I’m losing that safety. Proof that self-negation is never the answer. When you lose yourself in pursuit of safety’s illusion and the illusion leaves, you’ll be left without yourself.
An essay wants to be itself. Something I can’t predict, but I can find a kernel buried deep inside my belly, pushing through hard ground. It grows and it grows and it grows, and it takes time to find the light. Let it take time. In the meantime, let yourself feel every inch of push growth creates in the friction between you and it. The core body of fullness will find in you its home. Let it be home. Let you be home for growth.
Today I wait on a decision. I want an answer. I don’t want to sit in the waiting, in the sifting. I want to know what’s next. I have a knot in my stomach from all the questions I carry and don’t want to carry. I could scream.
But instead, I close my eyes. I picture an oak root pushing through hard soil, probably feeling it’s too much, probably feeling it’s impossible, feeling it will never find water again, but without that struggle, it has no life. Without push, plants won’t grow. Roots can’t know water will be found, but they hope. And hope propels life to continue.
One of the ways I cope with the pain of this uncertainty is I try to make a story out of it. And then, I try to write the ending. I strategize, I two-step-ahead my chess moves, I make spreadsheets, and write emails. But when I do, I sabotage possibility. I sabotage hope.
I don’t know what the ending of my story is. How can I when I am sifting through the remains of total loss? How can I see what will be when I’m losing what was?
On a critically hot day, the kind where the sun beats with retributive heat and cooks iced tea to body temperature, my friend Audrey told me the word crisis means to sieve, to sift, to decide what to keep and what to let go. And this sifting takes time. Let it take time.
In the meantime, stop trying to make a story; stop trying to write an ending. Stop circumventing possibility. Instead,
remember the person you want to be: clear, calm, compassionate, playful, and present. Push through hard soil and become that person. Choose a hope that doesn’t depend on prescriptions of what will be but generates within itself a description of what is.
Let this be a trail through cactused crisis.
Let this be a gem sifted of total loss.
Let this be a wise wind opening screendoored illusion of safety,
until I step into snaky meadow and mosquitoed rock,
leaving the chessboard and typewriter inside,
letting the story’s end write itself.
"Choose a hope that doesn’t depend on prescriptions of what will be but generates within itself a description of what is." so beautiful!