Rest Assured: It Will All Be Taken Away

I was thinking about my love for my daughters…how fierce it is. How it permeates my being, exists in every particle of their beings, how it made them and grew them and nourishes them. I inhale love on the scent of their skin, their downy hair, their big doe eyes, their drowsy heads on my shoulders. It has made me into a person who sacrifices, who protects, who keeps vigil over sick children with a soft voice and a cool hand to feverish foreheads. It is fierce and present in each moment I breathe, when they are with me as well as when I’m working, pumping milk for my baby and trying to teach my clients about this force I don’t understand, which moves us and molds us.

And someday soon, that fierce, tight, protective love will have to move and be molded as well.

It will have to soften, open, become pliant and yielding. It will have to become a love that allows, a love that trusts, a love that lets go. I will have to become a person who allows, who trusts, who lets go.

That’s the game, isn’t it? We have to learn to love with our whole hearts, our whole beings, all the way, barring nothing. And then we have to learn to lay it all down, to let it all go.

Rest assured, in times of suffering and of joy; it will all be taken away.

And thus, on my drive home from work this evening, gratitude washed over me because I was driving, my hands on the steering wheel so vivid, so alive; because I have two littles to love who slumbered in the back seat; because I have someone to come home to; because I have someone to text and say I made it back safely; because there were yellow tulips to look at and because there was simultaneously snow on the rooftops. And for no reason at all except that all that will be taken away is still here right now.

What a gift.