My dear son,
The light in this room is failing, but I will not turn on the lamp. Shadows are more honest anyway. They do not pretend to be whole. They stretch across the floor like tired limbs, and I sit here, watching the grey world outside the window turn to a deeper shade of nothing, thinking of you.
You are in the thick of it now. I can see it in the way you hold your shoulders, as if you are carrying the weight of a sky that has forgotten how to be blue. It is a heavy thing, being alive. It is a heavier thing to be a man who feels the gears of the world grinding against his own ribs. You feel opposed. You feel as though the very air has thickened into a wall of glass, invisible but unyielding, stopping you from moving an inch further.
Listen to me. Or do not listen. But read this.
Everything seems to set itself against you. I know this sensation. It is not a metaphor. It is the physical reality of a Tuesday afternoon when the kettle will not boil and the spirit will not rise. You find yourself standing in a landscape where every path is uphill and every wind is a headwind. You look for a reason for the cruelty of the timing, but reasons are luxuries we cannot afford. The universe is not picking on you. It is simply being itself, which is to say, it is indifferent.
But that indifference feels like a personal attack when you are tired. You are at that point where you feel you cannot bear one more minute. The minute is too long. The sixty seconds within it are sixty individual needles. You want to stop. You want to lie down in the mud and let the grass grow over you. It would be easier, wouldn’t it? To simply cease the struggle. To say to the silence, “You win. I am finished.”
I have been there. I have spent years staring at a blank wall, waiting for a word that would not come, or a feeling that would not betray me. The pain of the hard period is not that it hurts, but that it feels eternal. You think this is the final shape of your life. You think the grey is the only color left in the bucket.
You are wrong.
Not because I am an optimist. I have never been accused of that. You are wrong because the world is a restless thing. It cannot stay still, even in its malice.
There is a specific kind of agony in the final minute of endurance. It is the moment when the lungs scream for air and the mind begins to unravel. You are there. You are at the edge of the cliff, looking down at the rocks and thinking they look like a soft place to sleep.
But consider the clock. A minute is a finite thing. It is a measurement of transit. To feel you cannot bear one more minute is the surest sign that you have already borne a thousand of them. You are a veteran of your own suffering. You have a track record of survival that is, so far, unbroken. Why stop now, when the debt is almost paid?
The opposition you feel is the friction of change. When a ship turns, the water resists the hull with a violence it did not show when the vessel was merely drifting. You are feeling the resistance because you are close to the pivot. The pressure is highest right before the pipe bursts. The dark is thickest right before the dawn, though that is a cliché I usually despise. Let us say instead that the silence is loudest right before the first note of a new song is struck.
If you give up now, you miss the turn. You stay stuck in the hard period forever, not as a victim, but as a ghost who stopped walking.
You must keep walking.
Even if you are limping.
Even if you are crawling on your belly through the dirt.
You must move.
This is the hinge of the matter. This is the truth that stays hidden until the very end. It is the time and the place where the course will divert.
You cannot see the turn from where you are standing. You are too low in the trenches. You see only the mud and the boots of the men who went before you. But there is a bend in the river. There is a shift in the tectonic plates of your destiny that only happens under extreme pressure. Without the weight of the opposition, the diversion never occurs. You would simply sail on in a straight, boring line until you hit the end of the map.
The hard period is the forge.
It is the place where the old, brittle parts of you are burned away to make room for something that can actually survive the coming years. When you feel you cannot bear another second, that is the signal. It is the bell ringing. It is the universe saying that the current path has ended and a new one is opening.
If you quit, you die on the old path.
If you hold on, even with white knuckles and bloody teeth, you find yourself on the new one. The diversion is not a miracle. It is a mechanical necessity. Something has to give. Let it be the circumstance, not the soul.
We are here to endure.
That is the long and short of it. We are born, we suffer, we find a few jokes to tell in the dark, and then we go. But the quality of that endurance matters.
I do not want you to be happy. Happiness is a fleeting vapor, a trick of the light.
I want you to be substantial.
I want you to have the kind of depth that only comes from being carved out by sorrow. A shallow cup holds little water. A deep well can feed a village. You are being deepened right now. The shovel is sharp, and the digging is painful, but you are becoming a vessel that can hold more than just a little bit of sunshine.
Never give up.
Not because life is beautiful, but because you are curious. You must stay to see what happens after the turn. You must stay to see the course divert. If you leave the theater in the middle of the second act because the play is too tragic, you will never see the final bow. And the bow is everything.
I have nothing else to give you but these words. They are cold comfort, perhaps. They do not put bread on your table or heat in your bones. But they are true. I have sat in the dark and waited for the world to end, and it didn’t. It just changed. It turned a corner and became something I could finally live with.
Hold on.
Not out of hope, which is a flighty thing, but out of spite. Out of a stubborn, human refusal to be finished before the job is done. The course is about to move. Stay on the boat.
Dad
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Robert Lukeman on Unsplash
