childhood fractures

on the practice of staying

have you ever considered that the liminal space could also be the present moment?

i’ve been reflecting on this quite a bit lately…how, at any moment, the ground beneath everything can rearrange itself overnight, leaving us in a state of profound in-between. one moment, life feels known, almost predictable, and in the next, everything shifts.

it’s wild how comfortable we become in the everyday how easily we forget the fragility beneath routine, and how often we try to manage life instead of surrendering into what is.

i keep thinking about how each of us carries a private history we don’t always speak to — a collection of old griefs, unprocessed losses, childhood fractures that never fully healed.

the way we learn can shape how school was experienced. expectations can shape how family was navigated. silence can shape how pain was held.

and maybe that’s more common than we admit.

like so many of us, there was a learning early on: to keep going. to serve. to give. to stay in motion. to find purpose in what can be offered outward.

it’s interesting…

the way service becomes both an anchor and a shield.
the way we sometimes care for others to avoid what hurts in ourselves.
the way our differences and struggles become the very things that expand us.

i recently opened an email that read:

“the best thing one can do when it rains is to let it rain.”
— henry wadsworth longfellow

the truth of that landed deep in my body.

and yet, even inside all of that, i keep returning to this…

the only way through is through.
through the pain.
through the unspoken grief.
through the decades of emotion held quietly behind the ribs.
through the experiences that never had words.

these moments, the ones we never ask for, never prepare for, become the practice.
a practice of patience.
a practice of presence.
a practice of sitting beside someone without rushing their process.
a practice of trusting that the glass is half-full, even when the world feels dim.

life is mysterious like that.

it bends us open in places we didn’t know were closed.
it slows us down where we’d rather rush.
it asks us to feel more deeply than we think we can.
it shows us that healing often looks like circling the same eddy until something inside softens enough to move again.

someone i love is navigating this space right now.
and in some way, so am i.
so are all of us, really.

i’m learning from it and not because i want to, but because life is asking me to.

and maybe you’re in your own version of this too — a place where things don’t make sense, where emotions rise faster than you can process, where you’re being asked to open and release what you’ve been holding more than you ever have.

if that’s you, i hope you remember this:
you don’t have to fix it.
you don’t have to make it tidy.
you don’t have to leap to the next chapter.

sometimes the most honest thing we can do is…
let it rain.