November 5, 2016 by Erin

On a Rainy Thursday

It took until Thursday afternoon of a long week off—four days of phone-scrolling or binge-watching or wardrobe-dusting finally came to this: the rain and the falling leaves and the words.

I’ve known for months I needed slow time, and a lot of it. An emotionally difficult 2015 bled into a rushed, busy 2016. I’ve been drained, restless, tossed around by one thing and the next. Not always unhappy, but tossed nonetheless. I knew I needed a real stop, a ceasing of the relentless movement I both hate and think I need. So I took a week off, more or less in secret. I didn’t go anywhere or schedule anything. I’ve been irrationally adamant about the secrecy—somehow I felt I needed to escape under everyone’s notice.

But it’s taken four days to stop. I just couldn’t relax, not really. I’ve not done much of anything, but I’ve filled these days with noise. Distracted from distraction by distraction, as Eliot says. And then, finally, I sat, almost fearfully, in the armchair by the window and listened to the rain. God must have known it had to be raining.

I opened a book and read about life and art and fairy tales, and without warning, tears came. Longing I’d forgotten about, then grief over the forgetting. How have I managed to live so many days without longing? How have I become so tyrannized by the mad, forward rushing that I can’t even bother to be bothered by it? When did I become the person who can’t stop moving? I didn’t see it coming.

But I think I know how it happened: disappointment, then disillusionment, then resignation and an escape into the numbness of busyness. If adventures end too soon, if risks don’t really pay off, if my life is not to consist chiefly of rainy, wordy afternoons, then so be it.

It is a cold and inescapable truth that these moments in an armchair are just moments now. In fact, I would not be able to afford these windowed city rooms without the job that so often takes me away from them. Heaven help me if I ever despise an honest living, or the glimpses of a bigger story I can see even in a cubicle. The real trouble is not that I must lead a normal life, but that I have ceased to be astonished by it.

Astonishment takes time. Wonder needs cultivation. Why am I surprised after two years of constant motion, I’ve forgotten I ever ached for more?

So what now? On Monday I return to the mad rush. I don’t hate my work—no, I have a team to build, processes to rethink, tools to develop. The demand will not stop, but perhaps, from time to time, I should. Perhaps I should start reading again, and writing, though the vulnerability of pen to page has proven  altogether too much lately. Perhaps I should run toward the places that ache with longing, not away from them. Perhaps I should just take a lunch break.

It needs to be fought for, is what I’m saying. I haven’t had the courage to fight lately. I’ve been afraid to stop, to cease, to pay attention. I don’t know of what I’m afraid, exactly, only that unmet longing seems too painful for longing at all. Busy distraction is easier; it is the unattended state of things. But here, as in most cases, the cost of cowardice and resignation is too high. I wonder how much more I can pay without forgetting completely who I am, or losing the wonder and gratitude I once found so easy to hold.

Even now I’m reminded, though faintly, I don’t fight alone. A whisper: “Courage, Dear Heart,” and the grace of a rainy Thursday afternoon. It is enough.