“The Ache is Love”

Dear Horizon,

I can’t believe you’ve been here 6 weeks already! I started writing this letter when you turned 5 weeks, but as you’ll see it’s turned into another deep exploration of what matters most to me at this time. I am once again ignoring the questions in the online baby journey app because I don’t / can’t yet have any “favorite places to take you” and our daily routines are far from normal. But once again, I am driven to ask deeper questions, both to tell you more about me, your dad and family and to capture what this season of upheaval and grief across the planet is creating here in my own heart and inside our home. This week I want to talk about fear, uncertainty, protection— how to allow both the beauty and the terror of life. I want to talk about it now because I am experiencing both in this fresh, new season with you.

Let’s back up a bit so I can share with you part of my personal story and lived experience. I have spent most of my professional life as an educator. I rarely have nightmares- much less recurring ones, but the one I will never forget started when I was a first year teacher. It was always about losing someone’s precious child. It always went the same way- I would be standing face to face with a panic stricken parent trying to make my mouth form the unutterable words “we can’t find them”..... Thank God this never happened. Not once- but that didn’t change the depth of terror I experienced around being responsible for children’s safety and well being . I wasn’t even close to having children at that time in my life, but there was nothing worse that I could imagine than any type of harm coming to someone’s child on my watch. So you can only imagine how this nightmare intensified when I became one of the youngest principals in New York City and went from being responsible for 25 kids in a kindergarten classroom to 600 plus kids in a K- 8 school almost overnight.

When I left school leadership to create my own company ten years ago, the imprint of those many years I had spent being responsible for the seemingly endless health and safety issues for hundreds of people seemed indelible. My experiences covered the spectrum of emergencies to long term systemic challenges, all of which created an overwhelming sense of responsibility for someone so young and “in charge”. I’ll never forget the countless interactions with detectives and officers from the 23rd precinct (East Harlem), the frustrating safety team meetings spent arguing about the best way to keep so many damn doors closed (and this was before school shootings really escalated in our country), and even navigating the fear and policy nightmares another virus related crisis, H1N1, created for school leaders. Safety and protection was a heavy, heavy burden to carry- and I’m not even including here the ever present weight of trying to create the conditions for psychological and emotional safety.

For at least 3 years after leaving school leadership, my body would intuitively feel any type of energetic or visible disruption in an environment - whether it be on the train, in a school I was consulting in, or even a shopping mall. I felt like some kind of border collie on constant watch - ready to intervene and protect at any cost. Still I had no children, but there was nothing more scary to me than to be unable to provide shelter and safety for a child.

Years later I would discover that I have a strong part of my personality that seeks to control my environment. In fact, it’s probably one of the most defining parts of how I show up in the world. “They (my type) use their abundant energy to effect changes in their environment—to “leave their mark" on it—but also to keep the environment, and especially other people, from hurting them and those they care about. “ (The Enneagram Institute). I love this part of me- (exploring the enneagram may be another letter or a few letters ) but for now let’s just say that your mother experiences extreme inner challenges when I am unable to impact (or control) the environment for myself and those I care about.

So if I’m really honest - the combination of my personality and the imprint of a lifetime of feeling responsible for the safety of lots of kids might be why it took me so long to have a child of my own. Over the years, I have subscribed to the wisdom of this quote/ “the quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can reasonably withstand” (Tony Robbins)... and while this pandemic has exploded the power of this truth for everyone whether you agree with it or not- for me it opens up a deep truth that I believe can help me ease my fears.

While I feel I have lived in an expansive way- mostly driven by love and not fear- I think I knew deep down inside that applying this acceptance of uncertainty thing as a parent was way too far beyond my capacity. Perhaps navigating the inability to create safety in a crazy world (which existed LONG before the pandemic) for a child of my own was just far beyond my limits for most of my life. And seeing just how many things can happen over the decades of being an educator just added to the challenge.

But the universe always conspires to provide the lessons I need, and I am now getting the chance to practice allowing uncertainty when the stakes are highest for me, because holding you is like holding the universe of all that matters in my arms. Looking at you reminds me of every good thing I have ever tasted or experienced in this life. Praying for you connects me to the deepest hopes and dreams buried deep in the soul of my humanity. And growing in love with you in these unmeasured hours while the world has nearly stopped spinning on its axis has pushed me, in the words of one of my favorite poets, Rilke, to the limits of my longing.... to allowing everything to happen to us—-beauty and terror.

Because the truth is, there really is no other way to live than to accept that life is made of both! In the work of the French writer Camus who wrote a story called “The Plague” in 1941,

“When it comes to dying, there is no progress in history, there is no escape from our frailty. Being alive always was and will always remain an emergency; it is truly an inescapable “underlying condition.” Plague or no plague, there is always, as it were, the plague, if what we mean by that is a susceptibility to sudden death, an event that can render our lives instantaneously meaningless. “ (Camus on the Coronavirus by Alain de Botton).

I personally do not believe our lives are ever meaningless, no matter how long they last or how they end- but I do believe that this idea of the frailty of life is the same one expressed in one of my favorite songs, Saturn, I wrote about in my first letter to you..... “how rare and beautiful it is to even exist”. This helps me keep perspective, helps me anchor into gratitude and LOVE.

We are traveling through what, for most of us, is the ultimate uncertainty when there is no “safe place” to retreat to...

• When we are worried about every single person we know on the planet on some level

• When we are grieving the loss of connection, of experiences, of life- and while many are lacking even the most basic needs- food, shelter and safety.

I realize that no matter how hard I try, I can’t possibly protect you from every danger this world holds. In fact it is abundantly true that I couldn’t protect you before this world changing event happened - but at least I could pretend- or block out most of the terror. So while this virus has clearly decimated any pretense about life and death, I find great solace and a response to the ache this reality leaves in my own heart when I read the words of Glennon Doyle in her recent book, Untamed...

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“The ache continues to take me with it, and now I am somewhere else. I am in the ache. And suddenly I understand that I am here with everyone who has ever lived and ever loved and ever lost. Right here, inside the ache, with everyone who has ever welcomed a child, or held the hand of a dying grandmother, or said goodbye to a great love. I am here, with all of them. Inside the ache is the “we”. We can do hard things, like be alive, and love deep, and lose it all, because we do these hard things alongside everyone who has ever walked the earth with her arms, eyes, and heart wide open. The ache is where you go alone to meet the world. The ache is LOVE.The ache was never warning me: this ends. She was saying: this ends, So stay.”- Glennon Doyle

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I love you so much. While I cannot promise you the protection and certainty I long to give you- I promise to show you to the best of my ability how to embrace uncertainty, be at peace in the “ache”, and go to the limits of your longing over and over again. Thank you for being here now. If I were to feed a question to the app this week, it would be “What would you tell Horizon about about going to the limits of his longing / desire in an uncertain world?”

Camus Article: Opinion | Camus on the Coronavirus - The New York Times

Go to the Limits of Your Longing

by Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.