Outlandish

My grandson was here for five days until the time arrived to drive him to the airport. Dropping him off I watched as he disappeared through the security doors, and then came home to a house that was once again entirely my own.

Given I had loved every moment of his visit what arrived in the hours that followed surprised me. It wasn’t grief or loneliness, but simply my body. It was making itself known in the quiet way a body does when it has been held in sustained attention for a long stretch of days. I was tired, not dramatically, not problematically, just honestly, completely tired.

We had done many things together over his visit. We’d planned some excursions and also let the days breathe, allowing them to open in unexpected directions. I stayed present, flexible and available as I wanted to show him a good time, to make his spring break full and alive. That desire came from love, freely given, without obligation.

And yet the body knew. Sustaining a certain pace asks something of us. And when it is over, what remains is a tiredness that is not a complaint but simply the honest weight of having been fully engaged. What also remains is the need for rest.

Along with the tiredness, and the promise of some down time, another voice quickly arrived. It didn’t announce itself boldly. It came the way old voices tend to come, quietly, almost reasonably, dressed in the clothes of common sense. You slept. You ate. Nothing difficult happened. What exactly do you need to recover from?

I have come to recognize that voice. And I have learned, slowly and not without some resistance, to look at it directly rather than obey it.

The voice, when I trace it back, is an old one, much older than this week. The voice carried a single word inside it, a word that was handed to me in childhood; lazy. I can still remember being told that by a parent, overwhelmed, releasing something in my direction that had very little to do with me and everything to do with their own interior weather. And the child that I was received it the way children do,, not as information about the parent’s state, but as information about herself.

In receiving such messages what that child learned was to stay vigilant. To keep one part of her attention always scanning the environment, always alert to what might be coming. Not because vigilance always protected her, but because at the very least she would not be caught off guard. It was a great strategy that provided safety.

Busyness, I have come to understand, is simply that same vigilance grown up and dressed differently. If I stay in motion, stay occupied, stay oriented toward an external agenda, the underlying unease doesn’t have room to surface. It is only when I stop, when the house goes quiet and there is nothing left to organize around, that the feeling finds me again. Not because danger is present, but because the nervous system still remembers the shape of vigilance.

This is what was underneath the tired body and the quiet house. Not laziness, just a child who learned to keep moving so she would not have to feel the thing that was always waiting underneath the movement.

Naming it for what it is changes something. It always does.

This is what inner work actually looks like. You come home from the airport and notice you’re tired. A voice arrives with an old accusation. And if you are willing to stay present with the discomfort rather than immediately reaching for something to do, the thread begins to show itself. You follow it back, gently, without forcing, and eventually you arrive somewhere true.

What is asked of us in those moments of staying with the discomfort is surrender, quiet, tender, and unglamorous. It is a willingness to stop organizing around an old threat, to let the vigilance rest, and to allow the stillness simply be. And in that allowing, that receptive openness to what might be found, something very much alive begins to surface. An aliveness that does not live in the motion, but in the stillness itself.

Another way to describe the felt sense of this surrender is to imagine you have been carrying a backpack for so long that you have stopped noticing its weight. It has simply become part of how you move through the world. And then one day you put it down. In the moment of setting it down, the weight announces itself for the first time, not as burden, but as contrast. The heavy becomes known through the lightness that follows. And you think, quietly, almost with wonder: Oh, that was heavy.

That is what the return to yourself feels like. That is what we can learn through surrender.

In such moments the inner journey can hold a certain quality that I can only call outlandish. It is like tasting a pork chop you think you already know something about only to discover that this particular bite in this particular moment exceeds everything you knew. The experience feels like a big, big love giving itself away in the most unremarkable of circumstances.

So, for today, let’s remember that no matter what unremarkable circumstance arrives or what old voice accompanies it the invitation is simply to notice and stay present. The more we give ourselves to these two things, the more versed we become at seeing what is actually moving beneath the surface of our lives, there in the interior, where the outlandish lives.