I OFTEN EXPERIENCE the days like someone rowing, and each time I slip an oar below the surface, it disturbs the water. When I’m tired or stunned enough to stop rowing, the water goes clear. In those moments, I can see through to the bottom. It always makes me wonder where I’m going. This is how we live. We need to move through the world, but only when we stop does the world open.
We see differently when rowing than when letting the water go clear. There seems to be a second sight waiting below our surface sight. Oh, we can see enough to get around, cross the street, go to the bank, and pick up the medicines we need. But each of us sees more clearly when the water of all that needs to be done goes clear. When still enough, a larger, more encompassing perspective opens and we see and feel more than the weather of circumstance we’re moving through.
When time opens, we can see briefly from all perspectives at once and from the longest view of time. In such moments, the course of many lives is glimpsed, which we sometimes struggle to make sense of. We’re stunned in such moments and utter phrases like “When exhausted, I saw my destiny,” or “In the midst of my pain, I felt the pain of the world,” or “When planting the last row of corn, I felt the hand of everyone who ever planted.”
This deeper seeing waits in the center of our heart for us to exhaust the world’s instructions, waiting for the day when we’re broken open. Then, over time or all at once, the light, making its way into our break, causes us to stretch and grow, which can feel like a deep, alarming pain, one we try to quiet or get rid of. When blessed, that stretch of growth doesn’t go away, and our deeper self begins to show itself, a sensation we don’t often know what to do with.
Then we wake on rainy days thinking, If I could take my dream of the future and open it in this moment, as if there’s no other time to live it but now, I might initiate my gift.
We might feel this initiation as the urge to paint, though we don’t know how to paint; or the urge to stand on a certain rock by a certain sea, though we’ve never been to that coast; or the urge to ask our oldest friend if she is afraid to die, though we’ve never talked about death. The appearance of such an urge is our deeper being looking for a way into the world. If we should follow this quiet urge to live, our gift will begin to fill us the way a hand fills a glove.
Feeling this urge to see and live more deeply is another way to describe grace, when our being is close to our doing, and anything we do with our gift in that moment—helping an old woman who fainted to a shady seat, or taking a turtle from the hot pavement and putting it back in the grass, or bringing a friend who dreams of carving wood to a field of fallen cherry trees—anything we do in that moment will bring us closer to the depth of life.
For much of our lives, we carry our gifts around in a small emergency kit that rattles open when we’re hurt or shaken. But there’s another way to understand emergency—as any instance that allows for the agency of our emergence to take place. In this regard, life draws us out, until our deeper ways of being become how we live—feeling, when we can, our connection to all life and all time.
If we could take our dreams of the future and open them in this moment, as if there’s no other time to live them but now, we might initiate our gift.