There, There Child

We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings

If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.

—Balzac, Pere Goriot

There, there child. Come now. Every day can’t be brass bands and beef steaks and roses.

Give me your hand. Let me hold it and trace with my fingers its lonely, ragged cul-de-sacs and shallow creeks. It doesn’t have to mean a thing.

Hold out your hope; give it to me. Don’t hold it so close. Let me feel what you’re going through, what’s going through that head of yours.

Let me look at your eyes.

I’ll let you in on a secret: The mysteries don’t scare me anymore. Someone once said that all silence is the recognition of a mystery, but I don’t believe that anymore and I’m not sure I ever did. I think silence is many things, and many of them fine, but I don’t think it’s the recognition of a mystery.

When you recognize a mystery –when you really recognize a mystery– I believe you’re compelled to address it, to speak its name, and to describe its features, to give it a face you will recognize until the end of your days. It’s no small thing, the recognition of a mystery, and I believe such recognition calls for some banging of pots and pans, some fireworks, some exultant noise.

Yes is not an obligation. It is a choice and the embrace of a privilege, and not everyone has even one honest yes in them. Some people are damaged and can manage only the side-step and the awkward embrace. These people are only too unhappy, however unconsciously so, to persist in the tragic human error of mistaking attention and respiration and mere movement for some form of sufficient affirmation, of mistaking this sufficient affirmation for affection.

There, there child. Come now.

Don’t make that foolish mistake. You are one of the lucky ones. You were born with a yes plumbed snugly behind your rib cage. If it feels heavy and silent within your chest that is only because it is still looking for its bell tower. Wait patiently. You’ll find a bright and worthy place to hang your heavy thing, and when it sways at last it will be heard, even if by only one other, and it will be answered, it will be joined.

Have you ever heard a bell ringing in a little valley town? It is a lovely sound, but there is something mournful about it nonetheless. But two bells, or all the bells in the valley ringing together at once? That is something else entirely. That is the music of the human heart. That is a joyful noise.

Wait for that.

Hold out for that –hold out hope– even if it seems like the price you pay for waiting is much, much too steep. Wait for it all the same.