Life is Unresolved

Life is unresolved. It doesn’t have clean boundaries, no blacks and whites, it cannot be tucked neatly into categories. In spite of this, we tend to exhaust ourselves trying to keep all the stubbornly stray pieces of life in a neat line, when in reality, they are not “stray” at all.

I, like you, find myself surrounded by the buzzing of daily life. My head clouded with the usual anxieties of motherhood, while sitting with dear friends struggling with heartbreak. Looming alongside today’s to-do lists are the usual “what ifs” and “what if nots.”

I desperately want to fix, to decide (even prematurely if just to have it decided), to try and relieve the breaking hearts of my dear friends. In these moments, I hasten to action precisely to ignore the reality of how I feel: scared. Scared because I am not in control. Scared because my friends are in pain and I can’t make it go away… I’m not meant to. Scared because it reminds me of how vulnerable I am too, vulnerable to the pain of something long past, or something that hasn’t yet come to pass.

But life is messy. It spills and bleeds into intricate shapes and colours with such unexpected beauty that, when standing back to admire, we see a larger picture and are humbled at the perfection of chaos. So we must try, if we can, to let it be messy. We must try to trust the natural unfolding of life: the moments of joy, peace, happiness, pain, sadness, and confusion. Despite how unnatural it may feel, it can remain unresolved, for as long as it needs to be, until one day it isn’t.

Be gentle, be kind, allow yourself space to just be, without doing, and know that you are safe even in the discomfort of the “in-between.” Because it is from that vantage point that you see the unexpected perfection of your life’s story.