The Beauty of the Messy

There are moments that open us before we have any chance to prepare for their arrival. Such moments are surprising because they bypass every carefully constructed defense and go straight to what is most real.

Such a moment recently arrived for me. It came through a song I had heard years ago, which also inexplicably touched me at that time. The song is Michael Bublé's Forever Now, and is simply sung by a man and his piano expressing his love for a new life. This time though, when the song found me, I noticed something different from my initial response of years ago. It was not that the emotion was new, the tears and tenderness, but it was the ability to open more fully to the moment. The music and emotion washed over me and I let myself be taken.

After I played the song a few times I wondered, “why does this song undo me?” I became curious and brought what had moved through me to my journal. The experience felt worth sitting with long enough to understand what actually was being touched. What I discovered at the bottom of the tears surprised me in its simplicity:

A longing to live from love.

There was also a quiet, certain knowing that love is what has been calling me all along. What the journal exercise revealed was that the emotion the song touched was pointing toward something I have been circling for awhile without being able to name it directly.

Beauty is actually found in the messy.

For a Point Nine on the Enneagram mess is not simply inconvenient, instead it carries a particular weight, a particular charge that goes back to childhood. I learned from my journaling time that for me mess meant disconnection, and this is why. As a child messes were not permitted. Messes were met with punishment, disapproval, and a particular withdrawal of the nurturer’s presence. For a child such an experience of withdrawal felt close to exile. Mess signaled I was out of alignment with the nurturer, and because I preferred alignment, I learned early and thoroughly that the safest thing to do was to produce no mess at all.

No mess at all is a very tall order for a child, but this no-mess formation arrived quietly and early, the way these things do. To my child mind mess equaled disconnection, which equaled badness, which made me feel guilty. As a child I did a very wise thing to not feel the guilt. I learned to smooth, fix, and anticipate disorder before it arrived and would do anything to keep the surface unbroken and the connection intact.

What I could not have known then, and am only beginning to fully understand now, is what that no-mess formation cost me. Now it is impossible to have children and not have a mess, and it is impossible to live life and not have a mess. It also seems that a heart cannot grow into its fullest bloom of love while it is busy keeping everything smooth; in other words hearts need mess. Mess is not an obstacle to love. This is what the song and the tears knew and were telling me.

As I wrote I worked through some childhood wounding and now have a clearer sense of my no-mess formation. I now see what the journal offered and how the inner work unfolded through the writing exercise. The cascading event began with hearing the song and noting some heart opening in the form of tears. The unfolding continued as I began writing what initially moved through me, which was akin to grief for the imperfection of myself.

I’ll be honest, when Buble’ sang the line “and I’ll never let you down” I wept. I knew I had let my kids down. I arrived at motherhood with the full intention of always being a supporting and nourishing presence, and then life happened the way life does. Without regard for the careful plans a young mother made in the first flush of love, terror and failure crept in. I carried the weight of that imperfection as Nines do, quietly, inwardly, smoothing over the surface while something underneath remained unresolved.

As I kept writing something else appeared, a recognition of beauty that lives inside the falling down and getting back up. The exquisite courage found inside the trying your best, finding it wasn't enough, and trying again anyway. In the end Bublé was not singing about a perfect love or motherhood. He was singing about real love found in the messy. Something in me recognized this truth even while insisting that the real and the messy were not compatible.

What I saw as I sat with this song and the journal and the slowness of inner work, is that the voyage through imperfection is not around it or above it, but through it. Through is where the fuller love actually lives. The love that can hold the joy and the horror together without needing to resolve the tension between them. Love is big enough for the mess because it was forged inside it.

Love of this quality cannot be manufactured, it can only be received. And receiving requires exactly what I have been avoiding, to let the mess be real, let it be seen, and let the heart open rather than smoothing over the mess.

What surprised me most after sitting with all that was revealed was the ease and lightness that gathered around me. A quality of groundedness that felt both spacious and completely certain. This peace is not the forced calm of my Nine no-mess formation managing the surface, but something altogether different. This peace is my heart’s desire to say yes to love, even when I am saying no.

I have been saying no to messy for most of my life. No to the disorder that intimacy requires. No to the vulnerability of being seen inside the imperfection. No to the full, unmanaged experience of a song that wants to break me open. And underneath every one of those no's, the heart has been quietly, persistently, saying yes. Saying yes to the voyage. Saying yes to the beauty of the messy. Saying yes to the fuller love that can only be found on the other side of messy.

Love’s invitation is not perfection or the absence of mess, nor the careful management of difficult feelings, but just the willingness to be taken by a song. The heart already knows how to say yes, it always has.

The practice now becomes simply getting out of Love’s way.

Reflection question:

Where is Love trying to take you, and what would it mean to simply let it?