All That's Unresolved

handing myself a clean slate

Earlier today as I lay meditating I got clarity about something I’ve been becoming more and more aware of: I need to give myself a clean slate. A blank page. An uncarved block. Wipe off everything on my plate and start fresh.

My memoir, which I started in 2014, hangs over me like whatever-that-word-is. It weighs on me, unfinished. Part of me wants to start over. Switch to past tense. Or just write essays. There are these unresolveds about it.

Albatross? Is that the word?

Rilke said—and my self-appointed mentor Cory Muscara reminded me that Rilke said—

”Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

And I wonder if maybe this is the answer to my memoir struggle. The unresolveds leave me confused: What do I do with the aspects of my story that I do not feel free to tell? Aspects of the story that are pivotal to understanding how huge of a salvation Young Life/Jesus was to me. Aspects without which the reader cannot appreciate the depth of my pain or degree of desperation. Aspects that make it much more compelling and meaningful. Aspects that are true. Aspects that were I to tell them could help a whole lot of people—one of the reasons I’m writing a memoir in the first place.

Another unresolved is my abuse. While I never forgot some of what I experienced, I know there’s much more I’ve repressed. I know because of the fallout—the effects; the devastation. But I don’t have details. One wise friend said, “Make the not knowing part of the story.” But it’s so hard to write about something of huge consequence when there are no details, no specifics. It’s like the door’s been broken down, there’s blood on the wall, and the whole place has been upended, but the body’s long gone.

It’s a cold case.

But if I just let myself not need to know, and not need to keep working on the memoir, and just let myself have no projects in the hopper, let myself be free of all I have in process and completely detach myself from everything, and then ask, “What do I want to work on today?” “What’s most exciting, present, alive for me right now?” Let myself let go of the shoulds and the oughts and the musts and the can’ts and the don’ts and the isn’ts and the aren’ts and the nevers and the heavy weight of all my expectations.

Even just writing about that I notice my spine gets straighter. My lungs fill up more fully. My head even feels clearer. I’m full of that “yes!” energy that’s connected to my Self, to my Soul.

I don’t want to be a slave to my past choices. To my projects. To any creative endeavor. Or to all that is unresolved.

Maybe I can move forward without answers and, instead, spend my energy falling in love with the questions themselves.

sunrise, Seagull Beach, Cape Cod
August 2023