I know how it is. I know how it goes. You just want to know what’s coming. You want to know if there’s something bad around the corner, or something good, because you don’t want to lose your heart to the bad, and you don’t want to lose your hope to the good, because there might be something bad coming after that.
The knowing means a calm and controlled and perfectly ordered life. If you don’t know, you can’t control.
It’s easy to understand. Because there is that past, when you were just a kid, or maybe more than a kid, when something happened, something completely dangerous and out of control, something unexpected and unwelcome, and you just want to make sure nothing like that will ever blindside you again.
And there could be something now, too. A too-empty bank account. A call you don’t want to get. A test. A job’s insecurity. A child. A big step into the black.
There is something frightening about the unknown. We try to leave it be, because we can’t change it anyway, when it all comes down to it, but then we care too much, we think too much, we fret and worry and agonize over all the details—surely there’s a formula that will tell us what’s waiting in the future so we can plan and plan some more.
It’s not easy living in this world of tension, where we aren’t really sure what’s next, whether we’re going to have to venture through sickening dark or blinding bright, and so we try not to. We try to figure it all out. We try to run it over in our minds, every possible situation sitting behind that what if, so at least we’ll be prepared. So at least if our plans don’t pan out we’ll have a backup plan. So we won’t hope unnecessarily and feel those hopes clanging to the ground when the universe throws its curveball.
But we know life doesn’t work that way. Because we just can’t plan for everything.
I did not plan on a layoff two days after I welcomed my sixth son into the world. I did not plan on being launched into my passion pursuits because there was nothing left to do but GO, hard, fast, without even considering its cost. I did not plan on loving so many boys around a dinner table so they could strip me of my control.
I did not even know how to put one foot in front of another.
And I cried and raged and shook a fist to the sky, because I just couldn’t see the end in it, I couldn’t see whether it would work or not, I couldn’t see all those possible outcomes, and it made my head ache with its impossibility, because I was just a small-town girl who grew up in a poor family, and all I knew was I didn’t want that for my boys, and I planned for everything, every single little thing, except I hadn’t planned on this, and here was a place where I could not possibly know everything.
Our circumstances, you see, asked us to walk a plank and pray it wasn’t the end. That we wouldn’t fall. That we wouldn’t go under in shark-infested water.
And then we did.
We fell, and we went under, and the sharks circled, and we tried to catch our breath and fight back to the surface so we could see the sun again. And we did.
The thing is, when the unexpected comes sweeping in, uprooting all those old oaks and tearing the roof off our house and lifting all the random toys our kids left in the backyard so they shift and turn in the vortex, what we get to learn is that those old oaks can be made new, and that roof can be repaired and we didn’t really need the toys anyway.
Before life began to peel the control from my cramping fingers, I thought I needed to know everything. I thought I needed to examine every scenario, every last possibility, so I could just go on and expect the worst and rise again when it came, as it always would. I thought that was best.
But a lost job offered something startling in its hands: freedom.
I sank and I nearly drowned, and my hands were water-logged by the time I climbed back out of those waters, but I rose again completely out of control and unprepared and surprised, and I felt free.
Control keeps us from freedom.
Control says we have to wrap our arms around it or else (fill in the blank). Control says we have to grip this circumstance in won’t-let-go hands until we have wrestled to the death, even though we’re the ones who will do the dying. Control says we have to live on a plan that always knows what’s next.
Control is not telling us the truth.
You, dear one, don’t have to know everything. It’s safe to let go. Go on. Let go. Just open your hand. Pry your fingers loose, if you have to. Let the sparrow fly, and feel the weight of the world and all its possibilities leave your shoulders once and for all.
The truth is, we can’t know everything. Sometimes life will throw us a curveball, and the only thing we’ll be able to do is duck and cover, jump into those shark-infested waters for a time, because the pitches just keep coming, and the only way out is in and under. And sometimes we walk not a plank but a bridge, from one beautiful side to another, and we cannot know which it will be before we take the first step.
We can know that we will rise again. And we will rise stronger. Always, we will rise stronger.
But first we must fall.
This is an excerpt from Dear Blank: Letters to Humanity, which does not yet have a release date. For more of Rachel’s essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
