On the Precipice, with a Poet
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One Thursday morning, I awoke early to a blanket of snow covering the world.
As beautiful as it was, I had several plans in the neighboring city, and it didn’t look safe to drive.
After hemming and hawing, I began canceling my appointments and found myself with a free day.
A blank canvas! Unlimited possibility! How wonderful!
And yet, I had no idea what to prioritize. I could get ahead on projects. I could respond to emails. I could rest and enjoy. I could adventure and play in the snow. While the last few ideas felt appealing, I have a lifelong habit of believing I need to “do all my homework before I can play.” As an adult, the “homework” is rarely done, so in my life, “play” is often procrastinated to the point of non-existence.
I do have plenty of play in my life, but I usually schedule it ahead of time or take designated trips with friends. When free time appears unannounced, I do not easily shrug off my goal-oriented tendencies and just flow.
But a free day! I did not want to waste this. I felt torn. Not between specific things, but vague things. I felt torn between ways of being. I felt torn between competing “shoulds.”
I should be productive and work on open projects.
I should be relaxed, spontaneous, and adventurous.
I should practice some artistic skill I want to improve.
I should enjoy this space and silence.
I should know what to do right now, including,
I should know how to handle this confusion.
I found myself increasingly paralyzed with indecision. The longer I struggled, the louder the voices became as they watched their precious resource—time—slipping away.
This torment went on for hours. Feeling helpless on my couch, I finally noticed the fat fluffy snowflakes swirling outside. For the first time all day, I thought to see the world around me, rather than my own internal swirl.
“What would you do?” I asked the snowflakes.
“Everything’s seasonal,” they said back to me, in that intuitional language of nature.
I relaxed a little bit. Right. This feeling wasn’t forever. This feeling is just a feeling. With the gift of the pause, I remembered to turn to a current source of reassurance: David Whyte, poet. I looked for an essay title that might address my predicament.
I found a piece called “Silence” which felt like a match because my day had been fully scheduled, but when plans changed, I was met with a kind of silence and I panicked a little.
I opened to the “Silence” chapter and after reading the first three words, I felt the relief that comes when someone you trust does not think your reaction is crazy. His essay begins like this:
“Silence is frightening. Silence is not stillness, but tidal and seasonal movement left to itself; an imitation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities. Real silence puts any present understanding to shame, orphans us from certainty, leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality, and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives.”
By David Whyte, excerpt from “Silence”, in Consolations
The essay continues beautifully, and when I finished reading it, I realized my paralysis was not a sign of a weak and indecisive character, but rather the mark of a courageous moment.
I picked up my own pen and began to write.
What follows is how I honored myself out of my own predicament. I wrote about what I was experiencing, and how it made sense.
Precipice
What if PANIC is a rite of passage, the necessary final throes of something dying?
I could resist both the panic and the death.
I could turn back and re-enter the well-worn mazes to which I have become accustomed.
I could reignite my habituated and cyclical patterns of behavior and thought.
I could settle, yet again, for unsatisfying outcomes; unsatisfying except for the comfort of their familiarity, and also, by the way, they are a match for how little I believe I deserve.
But on some days, I have just a little more courage.
On some days, I feel a little more fed up with my own anesthetizing rituals.
Some days, I begin to wonder what is beyond the bounds of my illusory limits.
And some days, I’ve had enough of my own deceptions, especially those designed to distract me from the earliest lies, the ones believed so completely that even the most robust imagination is no match for the void that arises when I wonder how else a life could be lived.
When all of those some days converge on a single day, I find myself organizing for change:
One part of me is eager for adventure, prepared to head out into unknown territory.
One part of me braces for battle.
Another part of me negotiates for immediate surrender, before I’ve even begun.
One part goes completely dumb, unable to remember what I’m even doing here.
Not knowing which part to trust, yet another part of me panics.
With all those parts and competing directives, no wonder I experience a kind of chaos on the cusp of change.
My interior has fragmented. Each shard has its own idea about what matters most and in which direction ’ll find safety, satisfaction, and love.
Where am “I” in all this?
I am the North Star. I am the Intention, earnest enough and determined enough, to survive the mayhem and eventually carry on, at least approximately and as best I can, in the direction of my own private and insatiable curiosity.
— Leah Pearlman
Epilogue
After I wrote this and made peace with my panic, I understood that I was experiencing it because I was holding out on how I was choosing to spend the day, I was holding out from going back into old familiar routines and patterns and filling it up unconsciously. I was wanting to live that free day with presence, and doing that felt like a new kind of intention or adventure for me. And so, as I shared here, embarking on that new adventure brought up a lot.
Acknowledgement
I want to appreciate David Whyte both for his poetry, which has lit the way in so many blind moments for me, and for his creative impact. I can’t help but see his stylistic influence in some of my recent pieces, including this one. It’s not my intent to mimic, but to allow my own creative voice to expand by experimenting with reverent imitation.
Exploration
If you find yourself with “open time” that creates more overwhelm than ease, this exploration may be a support.