Looking Forward

I was always nervous when I was little.

I have a vivid memory of going to the doctor because my stomach always hurt. I looked into the pediatrician’s kind face and admitted, “I’m afraid my Dad won’t come home from work.” This was a compelling and wrenching fear that kept me up at night.

As soon as I could write I made lists on post-it notes:

9 – wake up

10 – Mr. Rogers

12 – lunch, The Price is Right

I know. I was a strange kid. The Price is Right theme-song still triggers a Pavlovian response for me – even hearing someone whistle it makes me crave a PB & J sandwich on white bread. And this is no simple nostalgic memory – the craving comes like a force, from the very center of my being. Sometimes I think I can actually *smell* it.

My stomach still always hurts.

My father did stop coming home from work, and then my mother stopped too. The fear has gotten worse after the fact – not subsided. Before I had just that one thing to fear. Now I don’t trust anything. Loss – and the potential for it – dictates my life.

I still make lists – and though nowadays they contain drastically different things, the impulse is still the same. If I can organize the world, anticipate events and my reactions to them, I feel better. I have the illusion that I have a grip.

When I was little and I felt nervous at bedtime- I would go into my parents’ room and my Mom and I would come up with something to look forward to. Tiny little things – plans to run errands after school, or to make my favorite dinner, the promise of a weekend shopping trip, or the simple fact of an impending Saturday morning. Armed with a little promise of joy, a shield against the darkness – I would sprint back upstairs with lightness in my heart.

The cynical part of me wants to state that everything is different now. That I can’t buy into those little promises anymore, because now I know them to be illusions. But that’s what is so amazing and elastic about the human spirit, we can know something to be false and believe in it anyway. This is what gives belief such strength – because it’s not what we know that sustains us, but what we choose to believe despite what we know.

I know that we lose. We lose. We lose. We lose. Things slip through our hands before we even understand what it means to have them in the first place. I know that there is much darkness, both in the world and in our hearts. I know that we have good reasons to be afraid.

But despite it all I believe in that tiny light that glows at the center of things – the light that refuses to go out, even when you completely ignore it for the dark.