Leaping

I have a decision to make this coming week. It’s a decision that’s equal parts exhilarating and terrifying and it involves that proverbial leap of faith, and if you’ve been following these starry little dispatches over the last year or so it won’t be hard to guess what that leap might be.

I’m trying to breathe in the exhilaration and the terror and remind myself that abundance can only come when you open your arms to it. The world cannot get in when you hold yourself tightly against it and turn yourself away.

Let everything happen to you, Rilke says. Beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Breathe, and breathe, and breathe.

Photo by Adam Walker on Unsplash.

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So much of this past year has been about getting myself into the headspace for exactly this moment. Funny how that works, doesn’t it. You spend your time doing mostly ordinary things, occasionally throwing in a few extraordinary things here and there (thank you, Scotland, thank you, time), and all the while things are churning inside of you, readying you for a moment such as this one. Rilke was right—no feeling is final, and no state of being is, either.

A few months ago, when I wrote about working through The Artist’s Way and buying myself that candle, I remember feeling as though the choice to gift myself that little thing was at once tiny and momentous. So simple and yet so profound, this decision to take that plunge and believe in abundance, believe in a world that wanted to give. I bought that candle and revelled in its beauty and simplicity and the complete and utter joy of feeling filled to the brim by something so tiny. As though I’d unlocked something magical, or become Alice. The world topsy-turvy but in a good way, a way that reminded me of what Thich Nhat Hanh continued to teach all of his students right up until the moment that he died.

You have enough.

You are enough.

You are, in fact, everything that you need.

When you think like this, the tiniest things do fill you. Because you are already mostly filled to the brim just by being you. I’ve worked my whole life to get here and everything that’s brought me to this moment—even the grief, even that—feels inevitable to me now, in some way I still can’t quite articulate.

And still—and still!—there are moments when I find myself staring over the edge, looking down into that chasm below, and thinking: but I really should wait until that safety net appears.

It’s only logical. One doesn’t want to get splattered on rocks.

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Years ago my friend, the writer Gary Barwin, told me about attending a workshop by the writer Sheila Heti. In the workshop, Sheila said something that Gary never forgot. When you’re writing, you’re also becoming the person you need to be in order to finish that story. That’s a huge part of the work.

I’ve thought of this almost daily ever since Gary first told me about it. You are becoming the person you need to be in order to finish that story.

As I work my way through this book about grief and Jess, I see so many of the ways in which this book is also about me. (I mean, sure—it’s a memoir, Leduc. Obviously it’s about you. But I think you’ll know what I mean.) And I think about how I knew that I wanted to write about Jess almost immediately after she died, but had no sense of what that story would be.

I’ve spent the last four-and-a-bit years letting the story percolate and ruminate and grow. I’ve felt it slowly come together the way that stars and galaxies have swirled into being in the skies so far above us. But sometimes I forget that I have also been coming together, swirling into place along with this story.

When Jess died I knew that life was going to be different. I just didn’t know how. I knew only that nothing about the life I was living felt quite right anymore, as though some wispy, inter-dimensional wall had come down between my old life and the new one I was suddenly living.

I don’t want to pretend anymore, I remember thinking at multiple points. I just want to write. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.

Now it feels as though that wispy inter-dimensional wall has dissolved at the edge of the cliff, and here I am. Do I take that jump and try to make a life from writing? Try to cobble together an existence with love and faith and scaryish levels of debt (not on the level that I used to have, but still there) and just believe, truly believe, that at the end of it all I am safe, and able to ride out whatever lies ahead?

I think so.

I might even know so.

You might fall when you jump, Leduc. But you won’t get splattered on the rocks. Not necessarily because a magic safety net is going to appear—even though it might!—but because your bones are made of stronger stuff than that.

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There’s still a chance that I might make the safe decision. (Which is also, for the record, a decision that carries its own happiness and joys and fulfillment.) If that happens, I’m not going to berate myself. There are two paths ahead here, and regardless of what I choose, I feel confident that the path will branch out again in the future. Life always gives us multiple choices along the way. There is always the opportunity to begin anew, to say today I’m going to choose something different.

But I’ve spent so much of this past year listening, and paying attention: to grief, to joy, to the world.

The moment that I found out Jess had died, I was standing on a sidewalk, getting ready to cross the street. The text from her sister came in and I lurched over the sidewalk, doubled over by horror. There was a woman waiting by the bus stop who came over to check on me and asked me what was wrong. When I told her, she held my arm and cried with me and shared her own story of loss.

Then she said, When you go home today, open your bible and see what speaks to you.

I went home and opened my bible and nothing spoke to me, not then. But what I’ve discovered over these intervening years is that the entire world has become a bible, with so many moments and days unfolding themselves in front of me, wisdom contained in a hundred thousand tiny moments. The entire world has held me in every way I needed, every time.

That’s what I’m trying to hold onto as I stand on the edge of this cliff, getting ready to jump. The sense that a million things might happen at once—that there is a safety net there. That the world will hold me in countless different ways even if I don’t see it at first. That you can fall and hit the ground and get up because you are made stronger by the things that happen to you (happen for you, as andrea gibson would say).

And most importantly, that we are our own safety nets at the end of the day—because we can catch ourselves, yes, but also because maybe, when falling, we can teach ourselves to fly.