On Learning to Stay Here
I currently have exactly what I want – you right in front of me, doing your thing… and I’m just here doing mine. Life at this particular moment is very, very good.
Occasionally, you look up from your work, turn around, and I can feel your gaze as you stare into a gap of space next to me as you ponder what to type out next on your computer. Having found whatever inspiration you were hoping for, you return to your keyboard and I hear the rhythmic tap tap-tap-tap tap that comes from people who type on the right keys. Then you stop and pause again, tilt your head, and ask me how to spell a word. I either tell you how to spell it, or I laugh and tell you it’s not a word. Back to the tapping.
Another pause, and you turn around, and start chatting away at me. As is always the case, you just speak about whatever is on your mind at the moment. And we talk about it. Except that sometimes I don’t like the subjects you bring up. I’m happy to talk about them with you — just because I like talking with you (don’t conflate the subjects with the speaker) — but they make me uncomfortable and they put this queasy yucky feeling in my stomach.
I don’t like the subject of you going away to do your thing. It may be only an hour away by plane, but I don’t care. I like the world as it is in just this second — and I don’t want it to change. I also don’t like the subject of you living on your own, laying the foundational bricks down on the grand house that is your life’s dream. We’ve both bought our plots of land with the degrees we’ve just earned — and I liked doing real estate school with you. Now it’s time to build our houses — in separate neighborhoods, it seems. I don’t like this subject, and I feel my blood pressure rising even as I think about it now, when you’ve finished speaking about it in the time being.
And there’s another thing I don’t like. Let me rewind a couple moments, and remind myself of something: I currently have exactly what I want – you right in front of me, doing your thing… and I’m just here doing mine. Life at this particular moment is very, very good.
So why the pit in my stomach? Why the frayed nerves of sadness coursing through my unhappy veins, and sinking my heart into a pool of lukewarm yuckiness? Right now, here in this moment, you are poking fun at me (what else is new), filling your screen with thoughts that I love to read, and all that I want is right here.
If I were to write to you to tell you these things, I can imagine what you would write back and say. You might tell me that I need to learn to stay here, in this moment, and appreciate it. That I need to learn to be here — and remain here — and not get carried away in my imagination into the scary and unknown future, with the unhappy parting that I know it will bring. Because we have today, and that is good enough for today.
Filling my mind and heart with the miseries that will come in the future only mar the pure joy in what is here right now. They are all part of life, and the misery cannot be averted by additional pondering over it — rather, that emotion and time is wasted on the inevitable; better to enjoy the sweet present as it is. As you told me before in tiny print, “I trust that [God] willed my life, and that in His provision of love and joy, along with pain and hurt, He understood that humans would build the fabric of their lives with these.” The words echo in my mind, and they comfort me.
God will make a way for all of this. Already He has given all of us more than we could have dreamed or asked for — and in the end, all will be well because He upholds us in every turn, and His plan is far beyond even our most detailed understandings. So…I’m learning to stay here, and not run off into the future and be miserable thinking about it. Tomorrow will take care of itself — or rather, God will take care of tomorrow.
And as for today … well, I couldn’t ask for anything more.