This has been a year filled with big things for me: big grief and big healing, change and growing joy. Devastation and renewal are somehow sitting side by side. I have found it quite baffling. How do I make space to attend to it all? When someone asks how I’m doing, I struggle to answer. Lately, I have been saying something along the lines of “life is everything all at once right now.” There’s a temptation I think we sometimes feel to describe this sort of time as somehow middling, as if the highs and the lows average each other out. We use words like “fine” and “okay”.
But that’s not how it works, does it? All of those experiences and emotions are fully their own, and especially in the case of big emotions, they seem to take up all the available space. I have days that somehow feel both entirely terrible and completely wondrous. This is nothing close to average, or okay, or fine. It is extraordinary, overwhelming, a kaleidoscope of overwhelming things.
I love the movie Stranger than Fiction. In one scene, the main character is trying to figure out if the narrative he is in is a comedy or a tragedy. He carefully tallies check marks under each column as he moves through his day, trying to ascertain what kind of world he lives in. But it’s both, right? At the end of the day, we live in both columns at once, always. It can feel sometimes like we’re moved suddenly from one column to the other and back again, but the fullness of the world and our human experiences is really just… all of it.
As people we so often tend to cling to one column or another. The story we tell about our lives, or a particular season we’re in, is one or the other. Comedy or tragedy. Good or bad, or maybe boring. But what does it look like to live in all of those spaces at once? To participate in the reality that life is all of those things most of the time— good, bad, and boring.
What does it look like to give full autonomy to the breadth of our experiences, even when they are happening all at once? How do we recognize each of them as important and valid, even if a different and somehow contrary experience is right on its heels? How can we honor that spectrum, participate in its wild fullness, and not diminish it?
Recently, I have been picturing a big table with a variety of demanding guests. Each emotion at the table has its own inexcusable particularity. They aren’t necessarily there because of each other or in reference to each other, but they’re all persistently there, asking to be attended to. I want so badly to tell a story about how this came about, to find a through line that connects it all, but my attempts fall short. It just is. They just are. They’re at the table with me and all I can do is muddle through and figure out how on earth to acknowledge and sit with all of it at once. What does it mean to offer hospitality— both space and attention— to such widely different companions? What does it look like to create space at the table for every one, each in all their nuance?
Honestly, I’m still learning. But something about this picture of a table, of offering hospitality, helps me a little. I can see the whole range of what I’m experiencing as present simultaneously, but also distinct. It helps me to guide my attention. What am I ignoring? How can I be more generous toward that boisterous guest? What is sitting quietly to the side waiting to be noticed? Instead of flattening my experience down to a 1 to 10 sliding scale, this picture offers a way of showing it all gathered together. I can ask myself what is at the table today, and what I might be able to offer to it. Some days, the answer might be nothing. But on other days, this image might help me to sit with more compassion, more vulnerability, and more attentiveness to the wide, wild range of what life has brought my way.
Wellspring 