“There is nothing more intimate in a life than the secret under-territory where it anchors.” ~John Donohue
Even when I didn’t understand it, I’ve always known about secret still waters. When playing in the ocean as a kid, I would often go deep when a big wave was coming. If I went deep enough, I wouldn’t feel the intensity of the wave.
Sometimes big waves scared me a little. When riding a bigger wave, I was visible. I got bounced around a bit and heard the crashing sounds. But going to the depths, I was alone. It was quiet. I wasn’t afraid.
One way to get past anxiety when “big waves” come is by learning to go deep. We picture the stillness of the deep water. We sink down and be still. Maybe we recognize that God is with us, or we meditate on the small present moment we find ourselves in.
We breathe in deeply and hold it for a moment. Then a slow exhale. This can be repeated for as long as it takes to find stillness, or for as long as we have time for. I read an article that encouraged practicing deep breathing every time we stop at a red light. Instead of being frustrated at having to stop, we can appreciate the built-in pause to give our hearts some rest.
When coming up after a big wave, there was always a big exhale. I would look around and see things were calmer. Lightheartedness would come back. Another big wave would likely come, but I figured out how to “survive.” Just keep going deep.
As we get older, we acquire experience and, hopefully with it, we gain wisdom. We are filled up by the lives we live. But muddled in with experience and wisdom, we have loss and pain and struggle. Sometimes that causes cataracts in our vision. We long for a fresh way to see things we might already “know.”
A band I have been enjoying, Bleachers, covers a song called “Whole of the Moon.” I love the line:
“I saw the crescent; you saw the whole of the moon.”
We usually see in part, and there’s times when someone else sees more. When we connect with someone’s writing, whether in song, prose or poetry, it’s often something that we intuitively know but didn’t have words for. Ah, that’s it! And we get to see beyond the crescent.
Creative people don’t take us to new places. They find new pathways to places and ideas we have visited before. They take us on a “scenic route.” It’s one of the reasons we need to seek out stories, poems, essays, good fiction, and new music. So often we come across something and have that “aha” moment, not because we never knew it, but because we never saw it in that way.
A fact will burst into our lives. “I never knew that,” we say when presented with a new fact. But truth unfolds. “I see that more clearly now,” we say when presented with a new perspective. Although facts can be useful, we are all really after truth. The older we get, the more we try to whittle away the superfluous.
As we read quality books, we pick up insights that the author has gained in ways we likely have never heard before. We each carry a light within us that illuminates wisdom and guides us to truth. But reading can increase that, giving us bits that make us think and process what we already know. I love when I have to stop and think about something I have just read.
Below are some books I have read this year, with a quote from each that caused me to pause. The list is not complete and some of them have multiple quotes I could have used. And there’s not the space to mention all the poems, songs, essays, and non-fiction. Maybe another time.
If any books have impacted you in some way, made you think, or simply inspired you, please mention in the comments. We can share the ways that perhaps we got a glimpse at the “whole of the moon.”
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Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful “How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.”
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow “Time travel is looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”
Steven King, 11/22/63 “We did not ask for this room or this music. We were invited in. Therefore, because the dark surrounds us, let us turn our faces to the light. Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty. We have been given pain to be astounded by joy. We have been given life to deny death. We did not ask for this room or this music. But because we are here, let us dance.”
Hernan Diaz, Trust “For I’ve come to think one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to.”
Ann Patchett, Tom Lake “It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”
Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures “In the vastness of the universe, each remarkably bright creature has a unique purpose and contribution.”
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns “And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. A person of consequence at last.”
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing “We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”
Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women “…women who wish to advance in their career face an insidious kind of discrimination…no response at all. It was subtle discouragement by neglect, what the author called “motivational malnutrition.”
John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us “There is a light that shines in every heart….it is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life.”
I also read a number of page turners that were just fun. A few of those include First Lie Wins, Guest List, None of This is True. Because sometimes we just like a good story!
We often don’t believe we have any power because the idea has been hijacked by people who use their positions to force their ways. People in every sphere use words to threaten and manipulate, and we have all been affected by it. As a result, most have come to see power as evil.
But real power involves invitation. Helping someone go from despair back to hope is more powerful than any act of force or coercion. We invite people to see a new perspective, to share our hope, to see bigger.
We’ve all had times when we get blindsided by something. We have a measure of hope and things are going relatively smoothly. And then. We get hit with a challenge we didn’t see coming. We are tempted to quit all the declarations we made about staying positive. We’ve all been there.
And it’s ok. Our minds can’t process life in an instant. It takes a minute to look at the challenge squarely in the face, and let the effects of the situation sink in.
I had an example of this recently. I was praying blessings over those I love, and I was seeing the effects of it. And then one of my kids was met with some misfortune. They were rightfully upset and sad over what had happened. As moms, we feel all the pain our kids feel. I texted a friend and said, “What good does blessing do? Nothing matters.”
Knee jerk response. Of course it matters. After a little time, I came back to that. I think it’s ok to go down with people who go down. It might take a minute, but if we are going to offer them a hand back up, we’re going to have to pull ourselves back up first.
That “hand” we offer is often words. The next day, “Thinking about you. How are you doing today?” Checking in, standing with them, processing challenges alongside them. It’s not some big lecture or advice. We let them know they are not alone, and that helps them process and heal.
Despair is always trying to crash into mental spaces, our own and those we care about. By finding a thought or two that leans away from it, we are picking our power back up. The smallest of choices helps us bring light not only into our own lives, but also into the lives of those who may feel broken.
We fill our hands up with words of invitation. We have the power to go from “Nothing matters at all” to “It all matters.” And how we see that matters a lot.
As any woman who has birthed a child can attest, the transition part of labor is excruciating. Although it is generally the shortest stage, that offers little comfort in the midst. While we are screaming for it to end, those around us are assuring us that it is accomplishing great things. The baby will be birthed through this pain.
One doesn’t need to give birth to experience transition, though. We all experience times of intense change, either by choice or by circumstance. Like waves, ebbing and flowing in and out of our lives, they sometimes feel like they’re taking us under.
Even the most celebratory changes—like getting married or becoming a parent—include big changes. We leave roommates, parents, cities, the single life, or the carefree married life. To embrace something new, we often have to leave old things behind.
AS WE GET OLDER, TRANSITIONS BEGIN TO CHOOSE US
As we get older, transitions choose us more often than the other way around, and we leave things behind that weren’t our choice. We don’t always like it. Transitions often involve pain, but they are also necessary to birth a new thing. Whether we wanted that new thing or not.
If our lives were just about us, it maybe wouldn’t matter all that much how we responded. But people who make a difference in this world don’t spend much time complaining about life. So how do we get through the sometimes painful transition seasons in life?
WE KEEP OUR GOALS IN FOCUS.
I’m not talking lofty and complicated here. It could be simply believing that love is stronger than anything that comes against it. Or that kindness always counts. Or that seemingly crushed plans are not the final word. This past season required me to cling to the idea that good days were ahead. Some days I would get with a friend for a walk or coffee. Some days I would light a candle and declare that light is stronger than darkness. Some days I picked up an inspirational book. Some days I just prayed for grace and trusted tomorrow was a new day.
WE DECIDE TO NEVER GIVE UP.
Because it really is a choice. That doesn’t mean we are always chirpy or that we never want to give up. It might mean that we enlist help, either professionally or with those close to us. I really did “get by with a little help from my friends” during this past season. Some days all we can do is declare, “I can’t see it right now. But if I stay in the game today, I win.” Better days lie ahead.
WE BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF REDEMPTION.
It helps to have a core belief that pain is a teacher and every challenge is an opportunity to grow in ways we wouldn’t have sought out voluntarily. I am definitely walking down paths that never would have appeared prior to all the changes. There is often fear attached with the kinds of changes we face as we grow older. Maybe we’re alone now, or we’re dealing with a health issue, or we find ourselves without a job. But if we can remember that something new is being birthed through this process, we can better tolerate the pain of getting there.
The transition stage doesn’t define the birthing process—the new life does. I am 5’2” and weigh about 100 lbs, but five babies were delivered through this small frame. We are so much stronger than we think. If we are in a lot of pain, we remember that transitions are producing something, and they won’t last forever. There is new life on the other side.
“Often what alarms us as an ending can in fact be the opening of a new journey–a new beginning that we could never have anticipated; one that engages forgotten parts of the heart.”
Wide Angle Lens 