There are moments and seasons for every human when the pain and uncertainty of life feel too terrible to bear.
An unexpected bill arrives and anxiety lurches your stomach. Too many bills. Sinking into the sea of overwhelm. Too much anxiety. A world informed by “not enough.”
But then… a friend calls, and as you’re talking and allowing yourself to be embraced by the warm blanket of friendship, you notice a bird on the tree outside your window. A different current arrives, one informed by abundance. The circumstances haven’t changed, but your relationship to them have.
You fall into the cesspool of social media, and suddenly everything about your life is wrong: your partner, your work, your house, your body. It’s all wrong wrong wrong. Everyone else seems to know the formula for living well, but you never received that note. Despair seeps in. You eat more than you want to eat. You forget to move your body. The anxiety has a field day. Relationship anxiety takes over: I’m with the wrong person. If I had chosen perfectly, I could avoid pain.
But then… you pick up a book and read words that remind you of the vulnerability of being human. You remember that everyone struggles, and that there is no escape hatch from life.
When you look up, the world feels okay again. One loving action begets another, and you decide to go for a walk. You meet a neighbor and have a lovely chat while petting their dog. More kindness. More okayness. A return to the goodness of the life you have chosen.
Parenting carries its own heartbreaking pain. It could be a small moment that you know is a normal part of life but nevertheless feels like it’s going to shatter your heart: your young child yelling at his sibling, then at the injustice of not having ice cream for breakfast, then at you.
A teenager shutting down, laughing in her room with her friends but refusing to share anything with you.
Your 12-year old’s mean sarcasm making you cry on the car ride to school.
There’s an awful arrangement embedded into the fabric of parenting: at some point every child, to varying degrees of emotional and physical distance, will leave. The sweet 6-year old who snuggled into your body day and night, sharing every last element of heart and mind with you, must individuate, which, by definition, means separating from you. They come back, again to varying degrees, but it will never again be the sweetness of picking peas on a summer day with your 5-year old, then running to the covered porch before the storm hits.
These are things people don’t tell you about parenthood.
But then, through tears… you look up and see a flock of geese honking across a pink winter sky.
And then… just hours after your teenager hurts your feelings, she holds your hand and tells you about her day.
And suddenly… all is right in the world again.
We cannot escape the anxiety, worry, pain, and uncertainty of life. These difficult states can attach onto any topic – money, relationships, health, the world – but it’s not really about any of these things. It’s about learning how to lean into uncertainty, to allow our hearts to feel the broad spectrum of pain that populates our lives, and in the leaning, feeling, and befriending, we walk through a doorway that lands us in a different place, returning to the goodness and abundance of this terrible, beautiful world.
There is pain everywhere.
There’s also beauty everywhere.
Isolation is everywhere, and so is community.
There’s uncertainty everywhere, and trust is the hammock of light that makes the uncertainty bearable.
There’s disconnection and loneliness everywhere, and connection is the medicine.
Scarcity is everywhere, and so is abundance.
Stuckness and flow.
Heartbreak and joy.
Everywhere.
We have to look with eyes that see.
We have to remove the temptations of endless distraction.
When we shift our focus and put effort into being here, fear-and-scarcity eyes can give way to clear-eyes. And life becomes a place we want to inhabit once again.
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