Accepting Fear and Sadness as Normal Parts of a Good Life

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” ~Naomi Shihab Nye

I knew it was virtually that time. When I opened my eyes, it was pitch woebegone outside and I couldn’t yet hear the chickens in the loftiness waking up. It was 4 a.m. again.

In the past few days, I have loved this souvenir of jet lag; transitioning to a thirteen-hour time transpiration has afforded me this dark, mysterious quiet that has woken up inside of me the place from which I write—a place that spontaneously arises when the conditions are such that something flows through me.

However, next to me in my bed, my daughter slept soundly. I lay there, paying sustentation to and feeling my soul breathe, sensations welling and falling, and thinking well-nigh life—the past, present, and future.

As I lay there, I noticed the sweet ebb and spritz of my vapor and the glorious finger of the air from the fan washing over my warm and rested body.

Yet on this particular morning, I noticed my vitals rumbling and my heart tensing. I placed my hands on my soul and noticed.

Nothing in that moment could provoke anything but peace, calm, and gratitude, and yet, wherever you go, there you are. Regardless of how far I am from my physical home, I know that what lives inside of me, travels with me.

I asked these sensations in my body, what do you want me to know? Without hesitation I heard a voice, I am scared.

There was nothing to be scared well-nigh in the moment. I was completely unscratched in every possible way other than stuff yonder from home. I didn’t finger any imminent threat or danger to provoke fear.

I stayed curious and started seeing images of my father.

Earlier in the day while on a wend with my teenage daughter, a memory washed over me with an image of him. He loved taking us places and giving us opportunities to explore life. As a teenager, I often and unfortunately remember rolling my vision at him.

When I was in the seventh grade, he took me and my brother rafting in the Grand Canyon. To get to our raft boats we took a helicopter into the canyon. That summer there had been massive rains, and the water was brown from the mud. This made the pass waters muddy, which meant that my hair for five days was basically a brown ratted nest. I complained throughout the exquisite venture that my hair was a mess.

But what I thought well-nigh today in that moment on the wend was that he had gifted me curiosity, a little adventure, and a love of life in the moment. I felt a wash of gratitude and appreciation for him. The moment passed.

I unfurled to lie in bed and stayed present to the sensations in my body. Memories and feelings started coming of when things started changing.

I remember noticing there wasn’t as much supplies in the pantry, he began sleeping on the couch, he had increasingly doctor’s appointments, and snout collectors started calling. And there were increasingly fights between my parents and between us. Things slowly began to fall apart.

The money from my higher savings was gone. My wish for where I wanted to go to school wasn’t possible. And it wasn’t just me that was feeling all of this. It was all seven of his children.

In the undertow of ten years, my father’s merchantry had crumbled. My dad was an wondrous people person and a fantastic salesman, but he wasn’t the weightier at legalistic things. When the economy suffered a setback and changes in his industry began happening, he didn’t have the wherewithal to get support and ask for help.

So we watched the unraveling of his merchantry and felt the impact with no word-for-word words to describe what was happening. Nobody talked well-nigh it. We just felt it.

That stirring in my vitals was familiar. That yearn in my heart was moreover familiar.

It was a mixture of fear and sadness.

We are told to think positively and everything will work out. Everything will be okay. It sounds good to have that steer of light as hope. But that wasn’t my experience. He never recovered financially; his health deteriorated over the years and life was uncommonly difficult for him and for his family; his soul suffered terribly until he passed yonder at sixty-five years old.

We don’t often talk well-nigh the fact that life sometimes doesn’t work out: people get sick and die early, businesses fail, marriages end, children get sick, and people change. We say that there are lessons in those failures; we will learn and something positive will come of it.

Yes, there is truth in all of that. I live in the life lessons, see the positive in hardships, and trust that blessings are moreover a part of life, but we don’t moreover hold that life can be nonflexible and that leaves an imprint inside of us.

On this particular morning, as I lay in bed, I was reminded then of something important. The wits of watching my father lose his merchantry and his health deteriorate over twenty years was scary. He told me in our last conversation surpassing the fall that led to his death that he had entered into a visionless slum many years prior.

It was terrifying. It was moreover sad.

What I protract to learn is that fear and sadness are not self-sustaining of each other but are related; it’s not just that I was scared, but I was moreover sad.

Everything can be lost.

We often want to heal what hurts and feels uncomfortable so that it will go away. Or we pretend that it doesn’t impact the way we live, see the world, are in relationship with others, or plane raise our children. But the truth is that hurts like that, experiences like that, yo-yo us. They transpiration the trajectory of our life.

I protract to learn to hold with love and understanding that fear and sadness are sacred parts of me. They ebb and flow. They are welcome to have a home inside of me. I am not flawed or any less human considering I siphon them with me; in fact, they probably influence my marvel and my awe for our topics as humans to heal, grow, and make peace and live with pain in our heart.

Fear still comes. Sadness still comes.

I get scared sometimes when I let uncertainty of the future get the weightier of me. I can worry too much well-nigh what’s to come. Fear that I, too, can lose everything.

I finger my heart yearn at what could have been. The grief of all that was lost.

Life can be scary, and life can be sad. It can moreover be beautiful.

Despite all my father went through, he unchangingly looked at the positive. He never complained plane when he could barely walk, when he couldn’t take superintendency of his soul or sire vital things. He thought that it could unchangingly be worse and harder than his situation.

I think that it was a souvenir for him, that he could see the positive, considering it helped him live with the pain and losses in a dignified way.

The last phone undeniability that I had with my dad, not knowing just a week later he would fall and lose consciousness, I told him, “I am so sorry that life was nonflexible for you.”

He replied, “I lived a good life, Carly.”