SURRENDERED MOMENTS
When your head is clogged with the thickness of illness, everything feels heavy and frail.
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It wasn’t until day nine that I began to count the losses. After years of endurance, this particular narrowing brought me quickly to doubt. I wasn’t proud of myself, but the same walls made for warmth and protection had begun to feel like an inescapable cell.
These surrendered moments. When even the strongest of me fails. Is it natural in the weakness to begin to wonder what in the world I am doing with this one and precious life?
No Paris and its flea markets.
No grand design project I can point to and say, “I am doing that.”
Recently there has only been the quiet pride of getting through the private triumphs like needle pokes, infusion bags, CT scans.
When life gets reduced like this, I start to wonder: have I misunderstood what accomplishment really is?
All the little losses pouring out and down. Too seemingly insignificant to ratify with a full admission of their cost. But the cost has been there.
And yet, there is the reckoning that there has been nothing taken that hasn’t already been cemented into who I am.
This is where, to conquer the edging-in defeat, we must remind ourselves of who we have always been.
If it’s helpful for your wrestling of the dark night, this is the question that begins the birth of triumph in me:
Is there such a thing as an ordinary accomplishment?
Have I dismissed the marvel of the human ability to make something extraordinary of exactly where we find ourselves on this very day?
The thousands of little unrecognized moments begin raining down—gardening, writing, designing, holding the ones I love. These are not simply fillers of the empty spaces between one ‘wow’ season and then the next, but in-and-of-themselves something important and rare.
“Can you not see the constancy of who is within you,” I frantically inquire?
What is exquisite, masterful even, materializes in the quiet, unseen places intended not for the ‘others’ but for the audience of one.
It seems, to experience the abundance of appreciation that we crave, we must first begin with appreciating, even marveling in the rarity of ourselves.
Have we become adept at distracting ourselves…from ourselves? Perhaps for fear of finding some displeasure, we fail to examine what lies within. Still, it is here that we likely will discover something undervalued, diminished, glossed over that is meant not only for our grounding in the hard moments but also for our delight.
I lay head to softest pillow and take the inventory meant to heal—
I love the way my body moves to music,
the way I crave holding babies more than I knew,
the way particular words or phrases jump into my head,
the way I am able in my darkest moments to calm and self-soothe.
The collective we are watching for signs of humanity bathed in a self-reliance that endures [even transends] a troubled world —
In our daily comings and goings,
In our refusing to give up,
In our labor and in our leisure,
In all things hopeful, productive, creative that come from every one of us.
What lies within even on the most difficult days? Nurture. Covet, Remember that.
There is no mystery, not some great purpose we have missed along the rugged path.
The great mystery is the profound value of even the surrendered moments. These, maybe more than all the others, contain the best of us.
NOTES
Consider this a map back to yourself in the surrendered moments —
when you feel disoriented, diminished, or at risk of forgetting who you are.
These are questions to return to when life narrows, when strength feels thin, when the ordinary days begin to look like loss instead of labor.
Questions that ground you.
Questions that re-cement, in your own mind, who you are in and through all things.
What remains true about me, even now?
What have I mistaken for loss that is actually refinement?
Where am I still showing up, quietly, faithfully?
What capacities are intact, even strengthened, in this season?
What am I accomplishing that no one sees — including me?
What parts of myself have endured every version of my life?
What do I love about myself that has always been true?