There’s the feeling of standing on the edge of everything and nothing at once. So much that might happen. So much that could happen. And nothing has happened yet. You can feel your whole life leaning forward, and you can also feel that today, right now, for all your efforts, nothing’s changed. Sometimes joy and sadness in the same hour. The almost.
We’ve been taught to treat the almost like a waiting room. A dull hallway before the real thing starts. This week’s episode makes the opposite case: the almost is not the hallway. It’s the room. The waiting is not the thing before your life. It is your life, and there’s a way to be in it that isn’t agony.
I let three poets say it better than I can.
Galway Kinnell, in “Wait,” a poem he reportedly wrote for a student close to giving up: “Wait, for now. / Distrust everything if you have to. / But trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?” Not the highs. Not the crash the morning after the highs. The hours. They didn’t fail you before. They’re just not done.
Wendell Berry, six lines called “The Real Work,” for when it isn’t just waiting but stuck: “The mind that is not baffled is not employed. / The impeded stream is the one that sings.” The smooth stream makes no sound. It’s the rock in the water that makes the music. Being baffled doesn’t mean you’re off the path. It means you’ve come to your real work.
Rilke, to his young poet: ripen like the tree that doesn’t force its sap. “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Not solve your way in. Live your way in.
And then, for the first time on the show, one of my own, from a collection coming soon called Mirage and Tar. It arrived easily after a David Whyte walking tour, back home in the ordinary house after the extraordinary time. The first two stanzas:
Lightly
When you step, step lightly,though you may not know where to go. But step, and know you get there by going,not by thinking where to go.When you breathe, breathe lightly,and trust the air to be there.Your breath knows what to do without thinking, but will followthe way you want to go…
The practice this week is one small thing. Once today, name one thing that is ripening in you. Something real and forming and not yet finished. Then, on purpose, refuse to demand that it be finished today. Just name it, let it ripen, and go on with your hours.
The verb isn’t hurry. It isn’t arrive. It’s wait — the way Kinnell means it. Active waiting. Trusting the hours.
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Poems: Galway Kinnell, “Wait” (Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, 1980); Wendell Berry, “The Real Work”; Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. “Lightly” © Chad Prevost, from the forthcoming Mirage and Tar.
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