my dear son,
THe is lighting this room, but I will not light the lamp. Shadows are more honest anyway. They do not pretend to be complete. They stretch across the floor like tired limbs, and I sit here, watching the gray world outside the window, moving in the deep shadows of something, thinking of you.
You are now in the thick of it. I can see in the way you hold your shoulders, as if you are carrying the weight of a sky that has forgotten how to be blue. Living is a heavy thing. To be a man grinding the gears of the world against one’s own ribs is too heavy a thing. You feel conflicted. You feel as if the very air has thickened into a glass wall, invisible but impenetrable, preventing you from moving an inch forward.
listen to me Or don’t listen. But read this.
Everything seems to set itself against you. I know this sensation. This is not a metaphor. This is the physical reality of Tuesday afternoons when the kettle won’t boil and the spirit won’t rise. You find yourself standing in a landscape where every path is uphill and every wind is a headwind. You look for a reason for the cruelty of time, but reason is a luxury we cannot afford. The universe is not picking on you. It is simply being itself, which is to say, it is indifferent.
But that indifference feels like a personal attack when you’re tired. You’re at that point where you feel like you can’t take another minute. The minute is too long. Sixty seconds of this are sixty separate needles. You want to stop. You want to lie in the mud and have grass grow on you. It would be easy, wouldn’t it? Just to stop the struggle. To say to silence, “You win, I’m done.”
I’ve been there. I spent years staring at a blank wall, waiting for a word that wouldn’t come, or a feeling that wouldn’t betray me. The pain of hard times is not that it hurts, but that it feels eternal. You think this is the ultimate form of your life. You think gray is the only color in the bucket.
You are wrong.
Not because I’m optimistic. I have never been accused of this. You are wrong because the world is a fickle thing. It cannot stand still in its malice.
There is a certain kind of agony at the end of patience. This is the moment when the lungs scream for air and the mind begins to unravel. you are there You’re on the edge of a cliff, looking at the rocks and thinking they look like a soft place to sleep.
But consider the clock. A minute is a finite thing. It is a measure of transit. Feeling that you cannot bear another minute is a sure sign that you have already endured a thousand of them. You are a veteran of your own suffering. You have a track record of survival that is still unbroken. If the debt is almost paid off now why?
The resistance you feel is the friction of change. When a ship turns, the water resists the hull with a violence not shown when the ship is merely drifting. You feel resistance as you near the pivot. The pressure is greatest before the pipe bursts. It’s darkest before the dawn, though that’s a cliché I usually hate. We rather say that the silence is loudest before the first note of a new song is struck.
If you give up now, you will miss the turn. You will forever be stuck in hard times, not as a victim, but as a ghost who stopped walking.
You must walk.
Even if you are gender.
Even if you crawl through the dirt on your stomach.
You must move.
The hinge of this matter. That is the truth that hides until the end. This is the time and place where the course will diverge.
You cannot see the curve from where you are standing. You are too low in the trenches. You see only the mud and boots of those who went before you. But there is a bend in the river. There is a shift in the tectonic plates of your destiny that only occurs under extreme stress. Without the weight of opposition, diversion never occurs. You just ride a straight, boring line until you hit the end of the map.
Hard times are mandatory.
This is the place where the old, fragile parts of you are burned away to make room for something that can actually live on for years to come. When you feel like you can’t take another second, that’s the signal. The bell is ringing. This is the universe saying that the current path has ended and a new path is opening.
If you give up, you die the old way.
If you hold on, even with white knuckles and bloody teeth, you’ll find yourself in a new one. Diversion is not a miracle. This is a mechanical requirement. something has to give Let it be the situation, not the spirit.
We are here to endure.
That’s the long and short of it. We’re born, we suffer, we find a few jokes to tell in the dark, and then we’re gone. But the quality of that patience is important.
I don’t want you to be happy. Happiness is a fleeting vapor, a trick of light.
I want you to be substantive.
I want you to find the depth that only comes from being carved by grief. A shallow cup holds a little water. A deep well can feed a village. You are being deepened right now. Shovels are sharp, and digging is painful, but you’re becoming a vessel that can hold a little sunshine.
Never give up.
Not because life is beautiful, but because you are curious. You must stay to see what happens after the turn. You must be present to view the course divert. If you leave the theater in the middle of the second act because the play is so pathetic, you will never see the final bow. And everything in the bow.
I have nothing else to give you except these words. They are cold comfort, perhaps. They don’t put bread on your table or heat your bones. But they are true. I sat in the dark and waited for the world to end, and it didn’t. It just changes. It turned a corner and became something I could finally live with.
hold on
Not out of hope, which is a flighty thing, but nonetheless. Being stubborn, rejecting people before the job is done. The course is being moved. stay on the boat
father
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This post was Previously published at medium.com.
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Photo credit: Robert Lookman in Unsplash
