Quote Roundup #5: On endings, beginnings, and living in the middle
Life in between what you know and what you don't know is the place where you grow.
Last month, I traveled to Tennessee the day before the total solar eclipse. A woman I’d never met hired me to speak to a women’s group at her church. The topic she selected was “Declutter Your Life,” and I had to craft the talking points from scratch. This was a departure from the many years I’ve spent sharing with others about grief: how it often doesn’t make sense, how to be gentle with yourself when you’re hurting, how to allow what you feel to move through your body.
When the talk ended, my friend Darlene drove me back to her house at the foothills of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The duration of our time in the car was spent with her sharing feedback about my talk, based on what she and her friends discussed: “It was fantastic, Jeannie. Your tonal inflection kept everyone’s attention. You never said ‘uh’ or ‘um.’ The content was way beyond what everyone expected to hear.”
I thought about this from a place of emotional distance. It felt strange to hear such things about me when my daily life involves rotating among loads of dishes and laundry and meals. As Darlene spoke, I imagined she was talking about someone else, and I evaluated her words as objectively as I could.
It sounds like she’s talking about someone who has honed her public speaking skills after many years of practice. Like this person has grown in her ability to deliver a captivating message to an engaged audience. She was able to touch their lives and hearts in a way they didn’t expect but needed.
That felt fulfilling to me. It felt true.
I’ve been home for a while now, back in my routine of dishes and laundry and meals. It’s surreal to move in such contrasting ways—from ordinary mom to “fantastic” public speaker. In fact, the public speaker in me only gets to emerge once in a while, which makes me sad, disheartened. I have these flashes of time in which I’m displaced from my regular life as wife, mom, and all the other hidden roles I play. But they’re only flickers of time, like a day here and there every six to nine months.
What’s going on?
How is my life structured in such a way that I rarely get out to share my experiences and insights with others, but when I do, it’s like this magnificent burst of joy and connection? Why not more joy and connection and less mundanity?
I don’t know. But here’s the thing about that: Each of us is, or has been, stuck in the middle. We’ve been sandwiched in between one world and another—where we once were and where we’re now going.
It’s the murky middle that’s the hardest place to be. And that’s what I’m reflecting on today: the endings, the beginnings, and the in-between places that are tough to navigate when we’re struggling to find our way forward.
Your heart will bloom again;
Seasons keep changing.
—imann poetry
It’s springtime in northern Indiana, late spring, that is. Each year, I record in my one-line-a-day journal when I first notice the daffodils in bloom, or the forsythia, or the dogwoods and magnolias. Their colors pop out in short succession, usually in late March and always by mid-April.
By now, summer is approaching. It’s almost time for life to spill over in its abundance.
What happens when my heart is stuck in winter? I feel lonely, dejected, misunderstood, and overlooked. It appears that nothing is happening, nothing important, anyway. I just go through the motions of drudgery and try to make the most of it.
It’s hard when you’re a mom, and the things you hear on a daily basis include complaints and judgments and over-the-top emotional outbursts. Hardly any sort of compliment. Never something as lofty as “you’re a fantastic speaker.” Not that my kids know me as a speaker, or as fantastic. To them, I’m just me. Just Mom.
But I long to be more than “just Mom.” I want my heart to blossom again. I want the proliferation to come about, where my creative work is constant and steady. Like it was about ten years ago. Like I wish it were now.
It’s hard to believe good things are in store for us when life is on hiatus. Real life, I mean. Real living. As in, knowing who we are and sharing ourselves and our talents generously. When we can’t do this but are instead marching in a trance-like haze day to day, week to week, how can we find a kernel of hope that there’s more to all of this?
How do we restore our sense of connection, our sense of belonging in this ever-increasingly isolated world?
I’ll tell you how: you stay where you are and just do the next thing in front of you. Take the next step. Small steps lead to grand adventures. If you walk in the wilderness long enough, eventually you will stumble upon meadows filled with flowers in bloom.
What feels like the end is often the beginning.
—@iuliastration on Instagram
Two times in my writing/speaking career have I driven away from a location where I was hired to speak and felt like I was drifting away from a true calling: after a day-long women’s retreat on the theme of joy in rural Illinois and after my recent talk in Tennessee on decluttering your life.
As I left these locations, the effervescence gradually faded into heaviness once again. My life is heavy. I’m not writing this as a statement of judgment or evaluation, simply that it is what it is: heavy. Is that good? Is that bad? Sometimes it is one or the other, or both. My therapist told me recently that the reason I am able to write what I write—in the manner in which I write it (sometimes termed bleak or heavy)—is because of my everyday life.
My role as a wife, a mom, and a caregiver all fuel the words I share here, in this shared space with you. Without them, I wouldn’t have the same content. I might not have much, if anything, about which to write or speak at all.
But when I leave a venue where I speak (and the event goes well, which it doesn’t always), I feel a sense of loss. Like it was just a blip on the radar, just a fluke experience. It seems like an ending.
Is it true that something that ends is often the beginning of something else? I think so.
What drives this belief—faith, really—is that I see all natural things cycle through life and death and back to life again, especially in nature. I believe in resurrection, rebirth. I believe in redemption, second chances. The frailty of life has taught me that nothing is ever truly lost and that one good thing can, and often does, lead to another one.
The problem with my sadness every time I leave a good thing behind, like a speaking engagement, is that I have no way of knowing when the next good thing will come. It’s moving away from that temporary triumph into the uncertainty again. Most of my life is tenuous. Much gray, very little black-and-white.
So I wait. Maybe you do, too. Waiting is not fruitless when we learn to appreciate the breaks from activity, in between the here and there, the hustle and bustle. Waiting is a landing place for us to rest and be restored, so that the thing that just ended can sprout into something more beautiful when the time is right.
I can still have hope
while facing a future
I don’t know.I will sow good seeds
even in uncertainty.
—Morgan Harper Nichols
I don’t like uncertainty, yet I’ve learned from its wisdom. I often say that most people can’t tolerate uncertainty, or nuance, or ambiguity. It’s safer to hide behind our -isms and our creeds. We feel secure in groups of like-minded people, and it’s easy to categorize and stereotype others who aren’t like us.
But we can’t stretch or grow when we live behind a mask or curtain. What punctures the veil of our insecurities, then?
Stepping into the unknown. With faith. And hope.
This time of year, I reflect upon how a seed becomes a flower or blade of grass. In winter, I remind myself that something is still happening—something important, necessary—beneath the surfaces I can see. The earth is a womb encasing every tiny seed. And, with time and love and water and sunshine, it germinates. Then sprouts.
We don’t see the precursor to the flower. It’s invisible to us. Likewise, we can’t see what’s happening in our lives when it seems like we’re stuck in a holding pattern. Or we’ve been overlooked or ignored. It’s painful to be in the shadows while we see others soar. Each of us longs to be heard and seen and valued, but what we often forget is that the very ways our lives will bear fruit must happen in the dark, silent spaces we can’t see.
Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.
—C.S. Lewis
I’m going to depart from writing about my experience and be bold in a generalization that I hope so much resonates with at least one of you reading this today.
What you are going through is preparing you for your calling, your mission.
Every obstacle you face today, even painful stretches of years and years of dark times, are pruning your mind, heart, and soul for the good things that are in store for you. How do I know there are good things? Because I believe that none of our suffering is wasted. I believe that there is purpose in what we experience, whether hard or hopeful.
I have been in dismal seasons, and I have been in periods of flourishing. Neither lasts forever. One necessarily prepares us for the other: consolation for desolation, desolation for consolation. The key to arriving at your next stop along this journey of your life is this: practice patience and perseverance. Take the next step in front of you.
It’s okay if you are angry sometimes, even envious. We are all human, after all. But wrestle with things. Ask the questions you never gave yourself permission to ask. Be open to changing your mind about something or someone. Just be open. Because that is when the possibilities, sometimes clandestine, come to you.
It might seem implausible right now that you have an “extraordinary destiny” awaiting you. Extraordinary doesn’t mean the same things for all of us, though. It just means there is greatness inside of you. There is love. There is goodness. Trust that it will all coalesce for you when it’s your time, your season to bloom.