Not For This Season

What often is the case, but perhaps may not be obvious to others, is that you need to write even before you know what it is you want to express with your words. It's rather like being hungry and not yet knowing what you will eat. There is a physical need that must be met; a number of options can accomplish this purpose.

For almost forty-eight hours now I've wanted to post a piece under the title of "Yearnings." But I've been hesitant to do so, because it might force me to depart from my New Year's resolution, which was to turn away from the topic that obsessed me the last two months of last year, and not go back to it until perhaps at some future point when the unsettled becomes settled, the unknowable becomes known.

In the end, everything has to be resolved, but a title like "Yearnings" suggests the opposite of resolution. So it's a choice between the brutal truth or some acceptable metaphor. Let us see.

Today, I started thinking this piece might also be called "Learnings," because certainly by now there ought to be some of those too. I've never been one to stay still for very long; I keep moving, and so do the circumstances of my life.

Yet, today, talking with a friend, I expressed how hopeless some situations can become -- how the circumstances constrain your options, how the sequence of losses you've absorbed leave you little hope for a better day anytime soon.

In that case, you still your hopes and accept your tears. Rage, frustration, terror, self-loathing -- not the points of light that would guide any other lost soul through the darkest of their nights, let alone you yourself.

But if there are no learnings, you're left with your yearnings. That friend suggested that better days will come when you truly are ready for them; that was essentially a spiritual message.

If we take care of our bodies and our minds, then that leaves the spirit, which can be far more restless than the other aspects of self. Being free, a spirit seriously yearns, perhaps for impossibilities. There is no comfort there, either.

But of course your friend didn't mean spiritual in an abstract sense but in the need for prayer, for surrender, for faith.

This, then, is the actual battlefield -- giving up, giving in, retreating from the struggle. You never, ever would have gotten into such a predicament if you hadn't aspired to what apparently is impossible -- a kind of happiness and connection under the pressure of particulars that allow no such peace. Not for you.

Where does that leave you? Stuck. Stuck in space and time. Yearning. Better to admit it than to lie. You want something, you want someone, you want what you thought you had, you want what you thought you had earned and worked for for so long.

But you will not get what you want. That future is not to be yours -- that belongs to others now. Yours is the soul left to roam free, and that, of course, is the final irony. That those who value their independence so fiercely find connection, while those that value dependence find none.

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