BLOG | Small Reminders of Great Things

Sometimes I try not to think about a year as a year.

They are days. Just days. Days are so short, so fast. They come, heated and vital, and go like steam. But the shortness of a moment, of a particular passage of time, doesn’t ever take away from its capacity to change your life. Lately there have been days in abundance that have rendered my world altered, hard, in ways I never expected. Almost all of them have shifted me though, back to the same lesson. That it’s not what happens - not really. It’s what you do with it, on the understanding that the perspective you take on the matter is your choice alone.

This year I sat with Grief. I've hugged its side constantly like it was the only person I knew in crowded rooms, hid from it in bathroom stalls at the office, and have fallen asleep in its grip every day without fail. In the process, I had to learn how to be quiet in its company in a way I never had before. But a way now I see I had to learn. It was a fear of silence that deserved its undoing. And it was to that end, I was overwhelmed then to discover the other presences Grief had invited to the table of my life to share the meal.

Some faces were expected. More well known that I’d like. Sadness, Anger, Confusion, Jealousy, Frustration, sometimes Bitterness too. Some nights, they didn’t even eat, I don’t think. They just started brawls. Stole from the till. Upended whole rooms and got mad at the debris without taking responsibility for the mess.

But as time went on, such company became more scarce. In their places came to sit other things. Opportunity. Peace. Clarity. Intimacy. Healing. Closure. And yet. So often I found myself asking where Love was in all of it.

When you ask where Love is in the company of Grief, usually all you can hear is your own voice asking “Why?”

Until I realised, I knew exactly where Love was. She’d never hidden it. It was her serving our every meal. Her filling every cup, wiping clean every spill. Mending the splintered things she found on her way to adding logs to nearby fires, so these conversations with my selves would always be warm somehow. Even when they were savage.

That said, Love didn’t endure this service, I realised. She simply stayed. Because that’s what real love does. It stays. It rolls its sleeves up, ignores the mess, and helps. And when it’s not messy, she sees only to try and understand how she can make it better.

It doesn’t matter if her task is sometimes thankless - because real love understands that regardless of how it’s received, how it’s held, or not, its purpose remains true. If the only job real love does in a moment is to serve as a reminder that you’re still alive and capable of doing something so much more beautiful than just surviving your life, then she can rest. Because in that moment, real love’s done exactly its real job. And she did it for you.

Love really is never wasted, because it can’t be.

I’m so grateful now for this small but permanent reminder on my own body of that truth. I love now that even if the whole world should distract from that path, for the rest of my life I have limbs - and scars, and heartbeats, and memories - that will set me right. I love that maybe one day, when I’m gone and only this body remains, maybe in the moments before she’s returned to dust, someone reads these words and I get to speak them one last time to someone still living, even though my physical voice is long gone into the ether.

If that’s my echo in the universe…then kids, I’m good. Better than good. I’m at peace, which I'm learning in the great unfolding of all things, is infinitely better.

I hope wherever you are, you’re having the best day, and that the guests at your heart’s table are kind. I hope in this moment they’re reminding you of all the good, bright, hope-filled, extraordinary things you’re capable of when you go meet the world each day, however it is you meet it. I hope they’re reminding you that however big or small those things seem to you, they all matter.

But should kindness be missing, just remember your place: your seat at the table at the feast of your life. And know, even if you can’t always see her, I promise Love’s still looking out for you.

You wouldn’t be here this very second, reading these words if she wasn’t.