Join the Conversation
In 14+ months of writing Corona Cafe, I’ve sent at least three emails that compare our lives to a story—one that we have the power to author. (You can find these posts here, here, and here.) These emails have conceded, of course, that we don’t get to choose every plot element or character. We are not omnipotent, after all. (If we were, long Covid wouldn’t be a thing.) And yet, we do have the power to decide how to understand our lives; we can choose what stories to tell ourselves.
All of this storytelling involves stepping out of our lives, though. It is a pulling back, a zooming out, a moving away. We need such moments of taking in the bigger picture. But life isn’t lived from this panned-out place. Life is lived in tiny details—in your breath moving in and out as you read, in the clicking of keys as I type, in the connection between us, kindled on backlit screens and flickering across space-time.
Life, when we live into it, isn’t a tidy storyline. It bends and tangles—a complex web. At the zoomed-in level of everyday living—of downing supplements, scheduling doctors’ appointments, emptying the dishwasher, or driving the kids to school—life is not a story. Instead, it is (to borrow a metaphor from poet David Whyte) a conversation. Life is the sprawling conversation between coffee and taste buds, between ears and Spotify playlists, between Covid-19 and endothelial cells, between strangers on the internet, and between lovers and friends. It is the conversation between what we wish for and what we get, between our fear and the courage with which we live forward anyway, between the stories we tell and the realities we live. Moment by moment, our life is built in the dialogue between what we cannot control and how we choose to respond.
I was raised by a father who believes ardently in the importance of having ‘crucial’ conversations—high-stakes conversations that address differing views and strong emotions. This has resulted in some profoundly awkward family dinners. And zoom calls. And email exchanges. And—well, you get the point, right? Life isn’t always an easy conversation. It can be an awkward one, a painful one, a harrowing one, a hilarious one. It can alternate from beautiful to brutal and back again in a heartbeat. That’s the nature of conversation.
It’s hard for me to articulate, even to myself, why I love this metaphor—life as conversation—so much. But maybe these lines from Whyte’s poem Everything is Waiting for You will stir the same feelings in you that they stir in me, and then I think you’ll understand:
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
Everything is waiting for you. Will you join the conversation?
What aspects of our lives sit, unnoticed, waiting for us to engage? What sort of conversations are you having—or ignoring—today? What is your body saying? How are you answering back? What does your dialogue with the people in your life feel and sound like? How about the dialogue with your own thoughts? Or the dialogue with a diagnosis (or lack thereof)? What would you like to cultivate in these conversations—more compassion or presence or curiosity, perhaps? When you lean in and listen, what question is life asking of you right now? How will you answer?