This storm was something else. It was fierce and amazing to behold. The sky was lighting up in all directions, a roar of rain falling, and clouds of every color were on the horizon. It surrounded me. I was driving through it, and as I did, I actually turned off the radio so that I wasn’t listening to anything except the wind blowing in and out of the open windows around me, encircling the car. There was nothing playing that could match its magnificence. No soundtrack to compare.
Quite obviously, I found the storm awe inspiring, and I raced home to put that inspiration on paper. I pulled in to my driveway and immediately jotted my thoughts, typing as quickly as my fingers would allow me. I was moved by the storm, touched. Content to have gotten the gist of my feelings written down, I began my typical routine for arriving home from work. I changed my clothes, I placed my empty Tupperware in to the sink. As I settled in to the regularity of this pattern, my thoughts slowed. I drew them back to the setting at hand. My home life, late evening. I was already redirecting my attentions.
Yet, the thought of the storm persisted in my mind and my gut. I walked to the back door frequently to look at it, always returning to my couch and blanket. I considered going outside to sit in it more than once. Surely a small dose like the one I had been subjected to on my drive home was just a sampling of the kind of inspiration that could be waiting for me out in the dark itself. But I stayed still, my boots untouched and my jacket in the closet. I instead scrolled mindlessly on my phone. As I did, I could hear whispers in the back of my brain telling me that this was a waste, telling me to go be a part of it. But I was stubbornly rooted. I wasn’t just neutral, I was specifically ignoring the storm.
Eventually, my phone was making me sick to my stomach, and I decidedly felt tired. I called it a night. I finished the routine that had first distracted me, now turning out the lights and letting the dog out. Before crawling under the covers, I pulled up my bedroom blinds and left the window agape to finally be with the downpour, even if only in this little bit. I didn’t want to expose myself openly to it, but I wanted to sit beside it. I fell asleep hard and fast.
When I woke up the next morning, a cool wet gray persisted but the storm was gone. I was grateful to still have a taste of what had been and to have arrived so soundly in to a new season. Already a reflective autumn to follow what had been a rambunctious summer. After my loss, I notice I am desperately on the move constantly. Trying to get away from what has happened to me and casting my hopes in to times yet to have arrived. An equilibrium can never be met to strike a balance concerning what is behind me, but surely there is more good to come. That is my lifeline.
As I sipped my morning coffee, casting an eye on the backyard and the lovely gloom, I considered my inaction the night before. My choice to gravitate to the back glow of my mobile device instead of toward a possessed sky. As I mentally considered my description of the night as “possessed,” the reason I had decided to stay away from the storm became clear. Possession. That was exactly what I was afraid of giving in to as I watched the evening’s sky-bound warfare. I didn’t want to face being possessed by my grief, consumed by it and everything that means. Of course for the obvious reasons-the missing, the longing. But there are other dark components to a heart possessed by sorrow. The questioning, the anger. Sometimes my soul is that of a fragile structure of sand, a grain away from dissolution as I fall away, weak. But other times, my spirit is frenzied by demented hatred and contempt. By rage. Sometimes it becomes incontestably unhinged. I didn’t stay away from the storm because I was too sad to look upon something of such beauty, but because I thought I might start screaming right back.
So I chose instead to stay numb. We choose numbness all the time. Systems that keep us numb so often keep us safe, and we like that. I like that. But there is a complicated “bright side” to grief that made me reconsider my numbness. It’s one of the smallest pieces of it, small like “gratitude” and “understanding,” but it does exist. And that bright side is that of reminder. Not the kind of reminder like forgotten information stuck on to the calendar, catching you off guard a few months later. But instead a reminder like a blister on your foot, from the long walk you’ve endured. Like a stitch in your side, to tell you to breath. Like an ache behind your eye, where tears spilt before. It is the kind of reminder that is felt at each present moment, and simply must be carried, because it is constant. My bright side reminder was present as always to tell me what I knew during the storm as much as before and after it. That no great moment was born of numbness. That nothing remarkable stumbles forth from it. That all of my fondest memories were instead created in moments of passion and that the ones to come will be too.
We choose to turn away from possession for different reasons. Laziness for some, perhaps for others it is ego. I think what often turns me from it is fear. Fear first most of finding something great and powerful. Fear of standing in the storm, of turning all the noise inside me off, and of hearing something I want so much to hear and want to understand. Hearing meaning. Hearing truth. I am afraid to actually tune myself in and find something waiting inside me. Even more so than that though, I fear finding nothing at all. I fear blatant exposure at every inch, to soak to the bone in the tempest and discover hopeless vacantness. Are we not all afraid that if we travel to our darkest corner, to the bottom of our deepest pit, to the smallest locked box at our core, that we will turn the key and find the room empty? What keeps me going now is belief that it isn’t for me to know if it is darkness or lightness that will be found there. I am no longer as concerned with what is there so much as caring for it regardless, just in case. In case it is needed. In case it is going to change something. In truth, I hope it’s more than that. I hope it’s tangible love. That it might mingle with yours and create something better. That it might go on and find some semblance of what has been lost. And for that hope, I have to stay on the move.
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