Sometimes there is nothing to be done but wait. There is a Jungian term called holding the tension. This is polite speak for the times when everything is collapsing all around you and your life is nothing like you thought it would be, and there’s nothing you can do about it. All you can do is wait for the right time to act. I’m in a situation like that right now with my husband and step daughter. All I can do is wait for them to figure it out. The thing is I know they will, but the waiting is agonizing.

This sort of mixture of agony and knowing is holding the tension. When it finally breaks it’s because a new thing, the third, has entered the picture. The third is usually a miracle of some kind. Well it feels like a miracle because it is usually an unexpected solution from a totally unsought place that arises and heals the split between the two things you thought could never be reconciled. TA-DA!

The third is the gift that comes after you have exercised the patience of Job.

So that’s what I’m doing right now, waiting. I don’t particularly like what’s going on but I don’t have the solution to fix it, because it’s not within my control. I can tell you first hand, it completely sucks waiting for the third. It is exhausting. But somehow there is a strange beauty in it too. It gets me to dig deeper, to reflect more, and it cultivates patience, a very underrated quality. We all know life can get pretty scrappy, the wheels have to fall off sometimes, the volcano erupts, but without this there can be no growth in understanding. I think of my step daughter like this, especially in more trying times. She’s my catalyst, sometimes a lightening bolt, getting me to think differently and move in new directions.

This falling apart makes way for the completely new, reinvigorated idea, or way of living. But there is no getting to the glory without trudging through the darkness. In that darkness the seed grows. It is nourished in an unknowable and irrational way. Hanging out in the darkness lets us appreciate the light that much more.

This disintegration of all we have known, or all we have been doing, or worst of all, everything we really believed to be true, actually forms the building blocks of what we will be next. It allows what has never been seen before to rise and come into view.

Letting go of what’s known is scary, but hanging onto what no longer fits us can kill our soul and purpose. So hang in there until the miraculous unknown presents itself. It will. It always does.

Here’s to being brave enough to embrace what comes.

kb