Precisely Because...

Precisely because some things have been so hard, something precious we have never noticed or deeply known before becomes visible.

Friday, December 22, 2023

I had this week’s Rocks & Water all planned out. It was going to address the dread uninvited guest who shows up at the holiday party, hangs around too long at the buffet table then follows you home. You know who I’m talking about…
 
Food Poisoning.
 
Given the season, I very much wanted to pass along some valuable guidelines for choosing foods, preparing foods, transporting foods, and safely depositing your dish on the buffet table, but something else came up which I urgently needed to explore. So now I’m going to dispatch all the cautionary festive food information with a link to a useful 3-minute read and get on with my urgent exploration which is an addendum to last week’s column on glimmering.
 
Glimmers are those ordinary moments of peace, beauty, resonance, connection, redemption, understanding, awe or simply those moments when nothing is actively wrong. One central point of last week’s column was how the pain points of the day dominate our view as we look ahead or look back while so many of the glimmers—maybe most of them – go unnoticed and therefore unabsorbed. Volume-wise, I’m going to guess that for many people this is a corruption of reality based on a casual study of my own daily glimmer/trigger ratio, which included a few days with pieces that could have easily toppled me. Still, even on those days with very hard parts, there were also great stretches of the day that were quiet, nothing actively wrong, and at many points even lovely. Given that discrepancy, I was making a case for flipping this unbalanced view of reality by training our eyes to see the great stretches of okay-ness that surround those spikes of challenge, thereby giving glimmers their due and us the opportunity to realize more harmony in our lives.
 
But then I had dinner with Joyce. Joyce is a dear friend who has withstood many losses in her life, more than her fair share, including the devastating loss of a younger sister a year and a half ago with whom she shared an uncommon connection, the kind only the lucky few will ever have. Lately Joyce has noticed the losses are picking up speed. Having recently turned 70, it is increasingly common for her to open the newspaper only to discover that a person she’s worked closely with has passed away. For her this is shocking and saddening but also quietly confirmatory that this thing we’re doing here on earth will all come to an end, sometimes quite quickly and unexpectedly. As we glimmered away a few hours last night, Joyce said she’s also noticing a change in how she relates to loss and life’s devastating challenges. Instead of feeling afraid, angry or indignant as I have felt so often when life has dealt me some hard blows, more and more Joyce finds herself instead marveling over the sweetnesses of life precisely because she knows so personally how fleeting it all is. She looks for and leans into these moments as treasures not to be missed, wasted or rejected out of anger over her suffering. Her wise, ironic discovery in all of this? There is something almost protective about using loss as the trigger to love life even more.
 
This hit me hard because it seemed exactly the opposite of what I’d been suggesting about how we needed to flip our view to focus on the great accumulating expanses of our day when nothing is actively wrong, all that space where ordinary little miracles hang out offering refuge, respite, enchantment, and contentment. In Joyce’s view, the glimmers will shimmer with even more radiance precisely because of the day’s sharp pain points. Kind of like losing power and then getting back.
 
I still believe those great glimmering expanses of nothing being actively wrong in this moment and this moment and this moment are so quietly lovely and offer such relief to a landscape in which we may have over-focused on the difficult parts. But there are also the moments that rip our heart out, leaving behind in that great yawning loss a glimmer of something precious we may never have noticed or deeply known before.
 
May you have a holiday shimmering with glimmers,
 
E