The past week has been a bit of a downer but I will allow myself that. Not to wallow but to accept. I have bad days; we all do. The difference lies in rising again and opening up to what is glorious and what is untidy and what is hopeful.
I embrace the messy.
I will admit it: this feels like time for things to fall apart. It no longer matters if the calamity is big or small anymore; we get crushed all the same, all too easily.
There are no good news. Only bad news and worse, it seems. Yet we cannot tear our eyes away. This past year we have all learned to become masochists.
This private apocalypse everyone is sharing feels like the only thing that binds us together even when we are more separate and divided than ever before.
It is easy to despair.
We are seduced by the option of giving up.
Yet we do not. We have wisdom enough inside of us to know that this will not last. Nothing does, not even the worst catastrophe.
“This, too, shall pass,” a friend told me once, years and years ago, and she is still right.
We take a break. We wash our weary faces with ice cold water. A clean towel to dry, and then we see the world with fresh eyes. We see our situation for what it is: dire, but never doomed.
We do not have to give in, we decide, but we will surrender.
We surrender to the reality that life is messy, that things don’t always fall in place the way we expect it to. We surrender to the way we are feeling. We surrender to the foolish hope that one day we will feel real hope again.
We surrender and we surrender until it is enough and we know this hope is true.
So we no longer fight it; we embrace the messy. We accept that we cannot fix everything that ails this world but we repair what we can. We do not give in to despair, we do not fall apart. We move on, full of foolish hope and a deep well of wisdom.
Forward we go, whole and unbroken.