What about when you get stopped in your tracks?
I don’t like to pause during my runs because I know that if my body gets a taste of a break, it may not start back again. But occasionally, I have to take a detour to the nearest toilet, or (in very much the opposite vein), I’m startled by a sunrise or beach scene or both that is so beautiful I have to snap a photo.
I don’t like pausing in life, either, from my previously planned programming; from the way I thought things were going to be. From the steady thrum of existence, which is to say my routine, the drop-offs and pick-ups and laundry cycles and reading moments and writing assignments. From the to-do list that I often turn life itself into.
Covid has interrupted that list with its ever-magnificent intrusiveness lately, first striking The Kid within a couple of days after camp ended, then hitting Little Brother three days later (with daily-if-not-more-frequent RATs in between in an effort to secure maximum overlap). This means that for a week and a half now, one or both boys have been at home with me.
Plans paused. Unwilling break taken.
“Turn in the direction of beauty,” Susan Cain writes, and girl? I try, I really do. It helps if my face is already headed in that direction, like when I’m running toward the sunrise and beach simultaneously and literally cannot miss them, but other moments require a more intentional gaze. Like when, for example, I’m about to crawl out of my skin with the need for solitude and it just ain’t happening.
Still, though (which should be a finalist for the title of my next unwritten memoir)–“there is beauty in what is,” according to Dani Shapiro. And there are moments when this beauty must be wrangled from what looks like disaster just like the moments I’m wresting away from the jaws of LB to write this. (We’ll have to burn the iPads after this current round of sickness.)
There are moments, for example, when you take your (currently) non-Covid-infected son to his first tennis lesson with a new coach and you ask him in front of the coach if there’s anything he wants to tell the coach about himself, and predictably (and wonderfully), TK tells him about his autism, and the coach, uneducatedly and not so wonderfully but perhaps thrown off guard, replies, “That’s okay, you can still be a good tennis player,” and you sigh with all the holier-than-thou wisdom foisted upon you since his diagnosis, sit down on the bench to watch the lesson, and then, unexpectedly because it’s been awhile since you’ve had one of these moments, a wave of emotion sweeps over you and the tears come and you wish you’d brought your sunglasses.
But you’ve learned. And so, instead of running to the shore, you ride the wave, because you know you can. Because you know you’re held. And after all the feelings come, and you’ve met each of them with your face and heart fully turned in their direction, you reach the other side of the wave, where in the calm you remember again what becomes truer with every wave, with every remembrance. And to this truth you cling, or maybe it’s that it clings to you: everything is going to be okay. And what could be wishful thinking or a dismissive cliché (at one time or another, it’s been both; in the wrong hands, it still is) is, in this moment and every one from now on, a promise.
The tears dry, but not before they sharpen your vision to what’s in front of you: a boy playing tennis against a backdrop that includes rolling hills, beaches, home. Beauty, all of it.