The Quiet of Being

I am searching. At times it feels desperate, as if I am clawing at the edges of something that won’t quite reveal itself. I ask myself how long I can keep going at the pace I do, how sustainable this life I’ve made really is. The years don’t stop to consider me; they keep rolling on. I notice changes in my body, in my stamina, in the small places of my soul I once assumed were eternal. Most days I don’t notice. But when the house is quiet, when no one is around, it settles in beside me.

I’ve read the great books, the kind that move you to tears and then to action. They’ve sent me forward many times, lifted me, steadied me. But I grow tired now, and I wonder: how much longer must I keep diligent? A few remain close to me, my circle of belonging, but the aloneness never leaves. Perhaps it is meant to be so, for reasons larger than my comprehension.

I know these thoughts are not only mine. They gather around so many of us, the way mist gathers on a field at dawn. We compare our small truths with some imagined larger one. What if there is a difference between what I call truth and what is simply The Truth?

There are threads binding us, fragile yet unbreakable. They stretch back further than our first breath. Call them duty, call them consequence, call them both. We mistake them for ownership—our homes, our loves, our triumphs, our possessions. We pray for more, we reach endlessly. And in the reaching we suffer.

We cling to one another as if it might save us. Parents clutch children until they are old enough to walk away, and then those children grow to make their own fierce clutching of someone else. And so it continues, generation by generation, as if we are each trying to grab hold of permanence in a world made entirely of change.

What if instead we let go? What if we loosened our white-knuckled grip and opened our hands, as though offering everything back to the wide sky? To trust that we are not unloved. To believe that even as human love shifts and slips away—through time, through loss, through the inevitability of death—there is something steady beneath it all. Not a shadow but a great light that has never once left us.

If that is true, then perhaps we can rest a little easier. We can stop asking if we’ve made mistakes, stop counting the steps forward or back. Our path has been traced since before we were born. Every turn, every detour, already accounted for.

And so today, I will let myself breathe into that. I will rest in the knowledge that what I am reaching for is already making its way to me. Not because I demand it, not because I suffer for it, but because that is the nature of being alive in a world that keeps giving, even when I forget how to see it.