Daily writing
EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU
There is a terrible arrogance in despair.
The conviction that you’ve seen enough of life to know what it has left to offer.
That the best has already happened.
That love has made its final appearance.
That whatever was meant to flower in you has missed its season.
And yet.
Somewhere tonight, two people who have not met are moving toward the moment that will change both their lives.
Somewhere else a woman of sixty-three is packing a suitcase, having finally decided that the marriage she has spent thirty years trying to save has cost her more than leaving ever could.
A man is sitting alone in his kitchen, laughing for the first time since his wife died.
And in a hospital room, a child is taking its first furious breath.
The world hasn’t finished.
Why have you?
I know something of the exhaustion that comes from wanting a life that hasn’t yet arrived.
The long negotiations with disappointment.
The secret embarrassment of having hoped so extravagantly.
But I wonder what would happen if you stopped treating your longing as evidence of something missing.
What if it were the living world calling to you through the only door it knows?
What if that ache in your chest were not a wound to be closed, but divinity itself moving in you?
Consider the audacity, the nerve!, of an acorn.
Buried in darkness, with no evidence of the sun, it breaks itself open.
Not because it’s been promised a forest.
Because something in it knows which way to grow.
And here you are, with your magnificent, battered heart, asking for guarantees before you’ll take a risk.
You want to know whether love will stay.
Whether the money will come.
Whether the work will matter.
Whether the next great leap will end in flight
… or another broken bone.
You want the future to sign its name before you agree to step into it.
It won’t.
The world has never offered such terms.
And thank God for that.
There is a wild generosity in existence that cant be negotiated.
You’re not standing outside creation
waiting for it to deliver what you’ve ordered.
You’re inside it.
The blood moving in your arteries is part of the same great movement as the tides in the oceans.
You’re not a spectator.
You’re the place where the world becomes conscious of its own uncontainable possibilities.
So tell me, what have you been refusing because you can’t bear to be disappointed again?
What have you wanted so badly that you’ve convinced yourself you no longer want it?
There’s no shame in being afraid.
Fear has accompanied every great departure since the first creature crawled from the sea.
Take fear with you.
But don’t build a shrine to it. And don’t kneel.
Look up.
The door is open.
Everything is waiting for you.
Everything.