I suppose there are days when the best you can hope for is putting one foot in front of the other.
Just get out of bed. Just journal. Just meditate. Just exercise. Just eat, something. Just show up to that one meeting. Just write that one section of that one report.
Just try to believe in something. Anything.
Just put one foot in front of the other, even though everything feels like it is collapsing. Relationship. Health. Family. Job. Spirit.
I have known those days. I have known friends in those days, more commonly that most of us might realize, when as David Whyte says in his poem, Sweet Darkness,
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
I have learned over the decades that it isn’t shameful to acknowledge these days. Breaking the silence, heals. And bridges. And claims a bit more of our humanity together, the kind that is not portrayed in the seduction of perfect lives.
I have learned in days like these, that letting go is important. Oh, it takes a discipline, doesn’t it. Letting go of stories, hurts, wounds, shames, disappointments. Letting go, to dwell in the emptiness, the between space, so that something might come forward from it.
Or maybe, just to dwell in the emptiness for a bit, without regard to whether anything will come forward from it or not.
David Whyte continues,
You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness
and the sweet confinement of your aloneness
to learn anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
And perhaps that is our job too, to just continue, welcoming an emptying, or an unfolding, even through those days when the only vision is the next foot in front of the other.
