Choose Your Reassurance, But Above All: Be Reassured

[Image: “Coco Cay Bahamas,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

My family — my birth family — is going through some difficult times at the moment. Oh, not to worry: compared to what so many must deal with, have been dealing with, we’re fabulously fortunate. We love one another. We miss one another when we’re apart. When we’re together, it’s like we were never apart in the first place. But it’s one of those periods of darkness during which people who love one another exchange glances, real or virtual, and — in these words, in other words, in no words at all — simply ask, What now?

Of course, we’re all adults now, and that comes with its own problems. We bear our burdens separately as well as together, letting them (or not letting them) spill over into our private lives as we will. We draw our own conclusions as we will. We speak to one another frankly, and we hold our tongues — as we will…

I love that whiskey river chose this week, then, to feature the following little meditation on recognizing what we can always fall back on, when the ground beneath our feet trembles:

Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don’t know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you’ve built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place of gravity and stability, where our feet can still touch ground.

(Deb Caletti [source])

It’s a time, really, when reassurance — especially sustained reassurance, reassurance we can draw on for years, for decades — seems to have become the world’s rarest and most valuable commodity. We find ourselves yearning for reassurance beyond time, beyond the real world:

The library director nodded, her eyes wandering. She clearly didn’t want to talk about pandemics. “Let me tell you something magnificent about this place,” she said.

“Oh, please do,” Olive said. “It’s been a while since anyone’s told me anything magnificent.”

“So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.”

“You’re right. That’s magnificent.”

“Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”

(Emily St. John Mandel [source])

Should we find no such magnificence out in the world, we turn to the person next to us — and find there both reasons for needing reassurance, and the hint of solutions close at hand… and even closer than that:

It suits us to pretend that we all belong to the one world, but we are more alone than we realize. This aloneness is not simply the result of our being different from each other; it derives more from the fact that each of us is housed in a different body. The idea of human life being housed in a body is fascinating. For instance, when people come to visit your home, they come bodily. They bring all of their inner worlds, experiences, and memories into your house through the vehicle of their bodies. While they are visiting you, their lives are not elsewhere; they are totally there with you, before you, reaching out toward you. When the visit is over, their bodies stand up, walk out, and carry this hidden world away. This recognition also illuminates the mystery of making love. It is not just two bodies that are close, but rather two worlds; they circle each other and flow into each other. We are capable of such beauty, delight, and terror because of this infinite and unknown world within us.

(John O’Donohue [source])

We’ll be okay — me, my family, you, the people next to us. We “just” have to… choose. I think sometimes we choose unhappy helplessness rather than any of the real alternatives, just because we remember so poignantly the times when someone else had to make all the decisions for us. It’s just our turn now!