Present Over Perfect

all my thoughts and feelings kind of person. While I want so
deeply and desperately to live right in the actual-messy-
gritty-fabulous-ridiculous present, I’ve got a whole arsenal
of tricks to eject me out of it. My earliest escape route:
stories. Then food. Drinking. Then working. Then
achieving. All the things we hold out as armor, insulating us
from the pain and mess and fear.
But the pain and the mess and the fear are the fabric of
actual life, woven amid love and parenting and bedtime and
laundry and work. When you insulate yourself from some of
it, you insulate yourself from all of it. And I want to be right
in it, painful or not, scary or not. As my friend Glennon
says: unarmed.
I’ve been armed for as long as I can remember, a
veritable bunker of books and meals and drinks and to-do
lists—they looked like real life, but upon closer inspection
they were my armor against it.
And in this season, this unabashedly midlife passage,
I’m laying down my arms, opening my hands, to mix the
metaphors thoroughly. I love the simplicity of this season:
it’s noticeably quiet, and I’m surprised to find how much I
like it.
I’ve been terrified of silence all my life, and for the first
time, I’m finding it beautiful. Aaron, of course, is a musician
—a pianist, a songwriter, a singer. But his musical soul,
really, is all about the groove, the rhythm. His all-time
favorite bass players play relatively few notes, and the
beautiful thing they make is all about the space in between