I have not lived a long life. Not by many people’s standards. I don’t know if I know much about a life lived, full of wisdom and stories. But here and now, at the end of the year and on the precipice of 34, I do know this: every day of my 30s has felt like an adventure in living convicted. Deep dread and cautious, hopeful curiosity. A thousand cups of coffee in half as many days spent worrying about a hundred things, only half of which coming true and the other half burrowing into my chest for another day (and another cup of coffee). A few of those days, I am beside myself wondering if a god is really a god or merely a figment of someone’s imagination all those some odd years ago, made true by scribbling onto something that screams “this is real.” I don’t intend to make it seem insignificant. It’s not. I don’t know that it’ll ever be. But I also don’t know that there should be much of any institution or idea that shies away from facing tough questions, turning away from people who need them the most. Like I said, I don’t know much.
A year ago, I would’ve been afraid of writing about god. Afraid of what people might think–family, friends, strangers–if I questioned what a god was, is, could be, has been, will be. If it’s true what they say and we really were created in god’s image, I can see beauty everywhere. But right next to it, a list of questions unanswered and agonizingly loud silence. Beauty is, after all, a pinnacle of a life lived well. But it does not come without burn marks and a whole lot of turning-the-page-to-see-what-comes-next, not fully knowing how long it’ll stick around. It could be that believing in a god is knowing beauty will not be forever, but right here and now, we must bask in the glory of what is good in each of us. I can see now why so many people choose not to question. Choose to pick what sits right with their soul. Maybe they’re onto something. Though, I’m not convinced that much of our every day living isn’t something similar. We do not know love as some tangible thing, but an infinite number of smaller, indirect things. I suppose that’s what God can be, too. That’s what sits right with my soul. That is always subject to change.
It might be true that every god each of us believes in is one in the same, just different fragments who a greater whole. It might also be true that they have gotten it wrong all this time when they said “love thy neighbor” but created an ideal set of characteristics of who thy neighbor is, who qualifies for that love, and who doesn’t. It’s hard to reconcile. Not impossible, though.
I posted shortly after the pandemic began in 2020, “How much collective grief can we take?” As a millennial, I can’t think of a time when we were living through precedented times. Surely I’ll get some grief from Boomers and Gen Xers with that statement. “You have no idea,” they’ll say again as they’ve said my whole life. “Really, you have no clue.” Perhaps in the grand scheme, that’s true. The 90’s, 00’s, 10’s, and 20’s have been one wild ride after the other. Before before then? The imagination does not reach there. I think this is why we misunderstand each other so frequently across generational lines. We have a brain full of half-stories that is our truth, each one a sign of the times, no generation before or after could ever really understand. We are fighting for different things: a world different than the one before us, a world as it has always been, and worlds completely different than we’ve ever known. I don’t think we get any of those without each other.
I’ll go quiet, as I have most of my life, to keep the peace like keeping the peace isn’t something middle children do all the time. Say, this is where the darkness fills me. Understood at no seam, and I keep stitching regardless, keep moving. They didn’t tell us how, at some point between anticipated quarter and middle life, it would not be one crisis but a thousand fires in the garden alone. This is not to mention all the joy. That’s what living means, I’d say. Love despite hope or despair. Joy, however fleeting, treated like a secret prayer, a captured lightning bug kept neatly on the shelf to remember another time.
I’m seeing a new therapist these days. They start every session by waiting me out to begin the conversation. I think it’s so that I can get centered in the space and slow down a bit. “Everything is so fast-paced these days,” I said on our third meeting. “I don’t ever know where to begin.” There are only so many ways I can tap my pen and scribble down something, going over the letters written one by one to try and calm my nerves. We talk about everything and nothing, some days. They insist once a week is necessary to make the progress I said I wanted. I reconsider for a moment what it is that I’m hoping to “figure out” or the “progress” I’m searching for. In my head, every other week is safe. It guarantees that I’ll have stuff to talk about that isn’t the stuff I really need to talk about, the stuff that I yearned for so long for someone to listen to me about. Without thinking, “once a week is good.”
I leave every session with a sliver of light shone on the parts of me I’ve kept covered, wondering how they got me to say the things I said. I surprise myself sometimes. Here I am again, afraid of what people might think. As if I can control someone else’s thoughts at all. As if it has any bearing on who I’ve been or who I want to be. Before language, I remember wanting people to read my mind without ever saying out loud, “these are my needs.” There are at least a dozen reasons I’d hope to stumble upon a mind reader. The real crux of it comes back to abandonment and the fear that everyone that comes in will inevitably exit.
But the slivers I mentioned earlier, I carry them in my pockets. I am lighter for more moments each week than the previous. Conscious of how to face hard things. I am merely scratching the surface of all the versions of me I faked in order to feel like I belonged places that ultimately were not meant for me, and even more so for all the versions that never saw the light of day.
I don’t know when it happened, but sometime since entering my 30s, I developed some sort of panic each time I’m in the backseat of a car. Something about being in a small space and not being able to control it, my lizard brain seeps in, stirs things, running amok everything I felt sure about. I don’t know how to describe it well but people who get it, get it. Panic is not rational. It does not allow reason to exist. It is an endless loop of what if-ism. I don’t think it does any good to try and prevent it from showing up. Somehow, rolling the window down makes everything bigger. My panic cannot exist in wide open spaces. When I’m experiencing panic, I look for a story to interrupt the reality of the moment. Any story, something compelling, off-the-wall, imaginative. Something about people experiencing the worst and coming out the other side. I don’t know if it helps much, but having something to turn to can get me from moment to precious moment. When every second counts, the breath is all I’ve got.
I don’t know much. But from what I can tell, we exist alongside deeply devastating moments. Epiphanies split unevenly across time. I open my phone on a random Monday to see news of more bombs dropped, paid for by taxes lifted from my pocket and yours. Gavin Creel passes at the age of 48. An aggressive form of sarcoma. James Earl Jones passes after a long life of teaching people about courage. Maggie Smith. Sheila Jackson Lee. 40,000 Palestinians and counting. This list always goes up. Rent goes up. Grocery prices go up. The moon waxes and wanes. Insurance doesn’t cover that costs of procedures, not anymore, and people are tired of this mess. People die. I scrunch my face. How do we measure a life’s devastation?
The election the election the election, everybody vote vote vote, get out the vote, call all your friends, make a plan, cast judgement on those who have real concerns about open air prisons and those same bombs from before, those who vote with their principles, those who vote despite their principles, each of us looking for reasons and finding twelve, each intricately tied to grief and a hope that the world could be different if enough of us said so. I don’t think anyone prepared us for all of this. The caretakers work around the clock to give people reasons to stay, to be here despite it all, convincing us that community is the way. Isolation solves very few things, though much of the time when I crave it, it is the result of a profoundly empty vessel, the same one carried all these years, scraping together remnants to offer the last sip to someone in need. I know I’m not alone in this.
And yet, it feels like it, no?
It’s true what they say, I suppose. When we reach the end of our lives, despite all who surround us, we are alone. In our body and our minds. There is no way but through to the bridge of the next phase of life. I hope I come back as a poet, I say to myself. I hope I live my dreams the next time around.
There is no time for any of this. But we brush against each other long enough to make a mark, however small, and despite the bricks we’ve piled onto our shoulders, hopeful to make it to another day unscathed. There are flowers here.
I don’t know. Or maybe I do. Maybe it’s somewhere in-between, somewhere I haven’t been able to put my finger on, or perhaps it’s something I’m not meant to “get.” Sure feels to me as if there are unserious attempts at things being a binary, either or, this or that, me or you, me versus you, there-has-to-be-a-winner-or-else-where’s-the-capitalism-in-that, and I guess I mean to say that I wish there weren’t such a need to go so fast all the time. The only thing I want to be in a hurry about is convincing people the slowness can be a real gift, not some imaginary wish-not-want-not. The early bird doesn’t always get the worm. Turns out there have been worms waiting for us all this whole time. The grass, though greener now, will not be soon. We learn to see after a while. After a brief moment of bewilderment. A moment of concern. Am I too much in this space? Should I be more? We can wait out the cold. We can replace the grass, plant a new garden in the spring, get the circulation going again.
We can do it together, eh?
We exist amongst giants. Shoulder to shoulder with the world’s bravest and best. Sometimes without ever knowing. It’s a miracle, we might say, to witness the aura and awe carried every day by the ordinary trip to the grocery, to the stage, seeing “You Matter To Me” live near my birthday some odd years ago, the coldest of temperatures I’ve experienced but warmest moments in friendship.
And yet, on the worst days, all I can seem to notice are how the joy is fleeting, bursting into blossoms and withering in the same few seconds. How lucky am I, I tell myself, to witness a friend coming apart and being stitched together again. To see beauty as it’s happening, this sort of poetry in motion, clouds hurling themselves into a direction that feels the most spacious.
I don’t know much. But there are days to keep living. Hope is not naive but sustaining. It is love in action. It is leaning into the hard parts about being alive. Especially the things we can’t control. It is not avoiding touch questions but choosing to live despite them. It is remaining steadfast. It is fighting for a better world, one without bombs and every stomach is fed and housing is a right. One where dying does not devastate because we get to spend our lives finding beauty at every turn.
A life is measured by the amount of beautiful moments we’ve chased. One of the perpetual soft landings we build for one another. Perhaps one day, after it’s all said and done, just before I drift off into eternal sleep, I am measured not by all the grand moments of splendor, but the amount of moments I stitched together after the rain passes, looking on both sides to see who stuck around until the end.
R. Francis Williford 
Leave a comment