Preempting Life’s Mess
How often do we try to avoid, prevent, preempt life’s mess? Sure, some messes are avoidable, but we can get into all kinds of contortion and self-blame when we try to stop messes that are inevitable parts of learning, leading and living.
Here’s a poem I hope will inspire you with a new outlook on those necessary messes…
Inspired by my daughter Esli
November 2021
You reach for the box of pompoms
My stomach flips,
Fingers twitch.
How much energy do I burn each day
Trying to put back in the box
That which hasn’t yet been spilled?
Avoiding an imagined mess and clean-up catastrophe
That my mind’s eye magnifies,
And for which my Inner Critic,
Self-righteous and sly,
Will drag me over hot coals.
‘We saw this coming, and you did nothing!’
Then why, when preempting promises to keep me powerful,
Does it leave me teetering on treacherous tiptoes,
Exhausted, and a little cheated?
Sure there are messes to be avoided.
Tread lightly on the tender ground.
Don’t upset the apple cart for show.
Be careful with what you carry.
But then, there are the messes that are the way of things…
Every raincloud
Every seedpod
Every blister
Bursts when it’s good and ready.
What arises is not a mess,
But what must be.
Here come more solid promises.
Raincloud, rain.
Seedpod, growth.
Blister, healing.
I might duck for cover, sneeze, yelp with pain.
But let me give up the pretence that I can stop it.
So too with the overdue conversation,
without which the silence already cracks us apart.
The decision that over time becomes a forced hand.
The change my heart longs for, that my head still dances to avoid.
‘Can I be bothered with the mess?’
‘Darling, the mess is already here.’
I squint at the box of pompoms and sequins and glue
That gives you untold joy to upend and disperse.
The mess of natural unfolding.
The mess through which you will learn.
So what if I lay down my pre-empting pretence.
Stop trying to prevent the mess.
Try to stay present,
Play my part
and trust that if I do,
it will all come out in the wash?
Hear this poem live
Join my Facebook Group Permission O’Clock to hear me read this poem live, interrupted by a power cut no less - art imitating life!