everything is waiting for you

on feeling held by the voices we're not trained to hear

I don’t know when I started being so afraid of uncertainty, but I know it started early. I just remember being an overly concerned child, monitoring circumstances and environments, convinced that if I could keep everything the same, nothing could harm me. Any change to any routine was terrifying, so I became hyper-fixated on building a wide range of rituals and stories to soothe the underlining tension in my mind. It convinced me that I was in control when of course, none of us are.

But what terrified me as a child, feels ridiculous to me now. I remember falling apart right around my mother’s 40th birthday, convinced that her death was now imminent, I started mentally preparing her eulogy and what shoes would be acceptable to wear to her wake. When my parents told me we couldn’t order pizza anymore, because my family was trying to save up for a cottage, I spiritually self-combusted and immediately started internally sorting which t-shirts I would pack for the homeless shelter we were inevitably going to end up in. This subtle state of panic in the face of the slightest change, continued into my early teens. My parents still joke about the time that the mere suggestion of celebrating the holidays at the cottage they paid off with all the pizza I didn’t eat, made me break down in tears as I declared that we couldn’t do christmas without “the table” and “the carpet” in our living room. My wonderful family, remarkably, took my strange demands to heart, and we celebrated at home, with the aforementioned table and carpet.

While it’s funny to think about a twelve-year-old making her family plan their entire holiday around inanimate objects, I’ve come to see this story as revealing a crucial truth. To the naked eye, there were four people involved in this familial conversation: my dad, my mom, my sister and me. But to my enchanting child brain, there were so many more voices that needed to be included. How would the carpet, that had been providing support and comfort to our feet every year as we ran down the stairs to open our presents, feel about a hard-wood floor suddenly taking its place? How would the table that carefully held my mom’s coffee cup every year, as she smiled and watched us ecstatically dig into our stockings, deal with the grief of being replaced by another four-legged structure that doesn’t know she’ll probably forget to use a coaster, but that my dad will remind her?

I wasn’t just connected to the people in my house, I was connected to the things inside of it too. Believing that they were witnessing my life, helped me cope with it.

Photo by qi bin on Unsplash

While this story paints a picture of a child that had an atypical and stubborn resistance to change, it also points to a deeper lesson: that if you pay attention, you’ll find care everywhere. Love isn’t just in the voices that you listen to, it’s in the ones that only speak when you’re silent enough to really hear.

As I was woke up this morning to heartbreaking news about a job that I was excited about, I found myself grieving something I never had, and yearning for the proverbial table and the carpet again. Certainty is a hell of a drug, and here I was, in complete withdrawal. I reached for a poem that has this unique ability to penetrate my soul and open my eyes to the support I’m not always trained to see. It’s called Everything is Waiting for You and my favorite version is the one read by its author David Whyte, on the On Being podcast. The poem can be interpreted in various ways, but for me it’s a reminder to let myself be held by every single thing around me.

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

-David Whyte

Don’t be a certainty junky, let everything surprise you and carry you.