I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to figure out what things mean. Not in the philosophical, stare at the stars and contemplate the universe kind of way.
More in the anxious, slightly unhinged, forensic-investigation kind of way.
What does this mean?
Where is this going?
What happens next?
Is this permanent?
Is this safe?
Am I supposed to hold on tighter or start preparing myself for inevitable disappointment?
I’ve spent an equal amount of energy trying to predict endings while I was still standing in the middle of perfectly good beginnings. Turns out, it mostly made me miss what was happening right fucking now.
And lately, something strange has been happening; I’ve stopped needing everything to become something.
A beautiful day can just be a beautiful day. A mountain can just be a mountain.
Someone can wander into my life, make it brighter for however long they’re standing there and I don’t immediately need to know whether they’re planning to stay.
Joy doesn’t need a five-year plan.
Which sounds painfully obvious when I write it down but apparently it’s taken me 37 years to figure it out.
But trauma makes uncertainty feel dangerous. If I couldn’t predict something, define it or secure it, my instinct was to analyze the absolute shit out of it until I could.
I wanted guarantees from a life that has never once offered them.
And when I couldn’t get those guarantees, I’d start grieving the ending before anything had even ended.
That’s such a cruel way to experience your own life.
To be standing inside something good while simultaneously mourning its eventual absence.
Healing, I’m learning, isn’t always this dramatic transformation where you suddenly become an enlightened person who drinks enough water and never makes a questionable decision again.
Thank fuck, because I’d be fucked.
Sometimes healing is much quieter.
It’s realizing you haven’t checked the clock.
It’s realizing your phone is open and you’re not full of anxiety.
It’s realizing you don’t need all of the answers.
It’s allowing yourself to enjoy something without immediately trying to determine whether you’ll still have it six months from now.
It’s simply realizing that your thought process has shifted to:
This is good.
And stopping there. No but. No what if. No contingency plan tucked behind it.
Just –
This is good.
That’s what presence actually means to me now. Not pretending the future doesn’t exist. Not refusing to make plans. Not becoming so detached that nothing matters.
Quite the opposite.
Things matter tremendously. They just don’t have to last forever to matter.
Sunsets only last 10 minutes and we think about them for years afterwards.
Some trails you only walk once and spend a lifetime telling people about.
People we love for seasons.
Places I’ll never stand at again.
Versions of myself that don’t exist anymore.
None of those things were permanent. None of that lack of permanence makes them less real.
Maybe permanence was never supposed to be the measure of significance. Maybe the point isn’t always to hold onto the beautiful thing.
Maybe the most radical way to move forward is to simply let ourselves not miss what’s happening right now.