Maybe they’re always there, and I just miss them.
This morning the fish were out in full force at my usual swimming beach. It is Australia/Invasion Day, it is the hottest day in quite awhile, and there are more people out than any day so far this summer, so maybe it was all that? Or maybe I was seeing them, really seeing them, for the first time. My goggles were annoyingly leaking, requiring me to stop and shake them out, wipe them off, and reposition them, so the typically-building cloudiness of my lenses didn’t stand a chance. And there they were: fish of all sizes, right underneath me, the whole way through.
Along with some creatures I couldn’t spot–the kind my family referred to as noseeums during our summers on the Gulf–those invisible sources of stings that aren’t the same exquisite pain as jellyfish/bluebottles but don’t feel great either, especially with the shock value added in. One such sting attacked my nose at my turning point and I grimaced underwater, where no one but the fish could hear.
How many things do we miss because they’re missing, and how many because we fail to see them even when they’re there?
Marc Maron’s recent interview with Rob Delaney should be required listening for any who consider themselves human, and it reacquainted me with Delaney’s singular articulation of grief–a grief so profound both because it was due to the loss of his three-year-old son, and because he faces and voices it so unflinchingly. He talks about being given the “access codes” to a kind of loss that brings gifts with it no one would receive otherwise; about how anyone who thinks he wouldn’t weave the “death, and life, and spirit” of his son into his life’s tapestry can “fuck off for a thousand years.”
I have always been better at noticing what’s missing than what’s there–at least what I wish wasn’t missing but is. Like a robust educational policy and set of accomodations for neurodivergent kids, or the same within churches for them, or an open bar at any establishment I frequent. I’m less good at noticing the things that are there, but are harder to see: the beauty in pain, the blessings in difficulty. I’m getting better at it though! I’m being given some access codes of my own, through all the things I never asked for but was given anyway, which is to say, grace in all its forms: years of singlehood that led me to New York; the only marriage I could feel safe in (and that could survive me); the brain differences within my child/ren and self that force me to see the world as bigger and fuller and more complicated and beautiful than the one I’d let it be before.
The willingness to look for what we can’t see–what’s missing, for now–and the ability to trust that it will be there when we need it? Sounds like faith to me.