Your Place in the Family of Things

We've all done it. We've all thought at one moment or another -wondered- what the world might be like if we weren't in it. Would the world fall to pieces because you weren't there to hold it all together? Or more likely, would the world go on seemingly unscathed by your absence?

I think at some point in all of our lives we truly believe the first to be true. How could the world possibly be the same if you weren't there anymore or worse, if you'd never existed at all?

And yet, as you get older and see the world for the big place it really is, you begin to realize just how it turns- with you or not.

I always thought that as I got bigger the world would get smaller, but it has continued to grow bigger somehow. Doesn't that seem to defy some law of aging, some right of passage that comes with entering adulthood?

No matter how big or how old I get, the world is bigger and older still.

My condo has a living room wall that doesn't reach the ceiling. It leaves a gap at the top so someone can stand on the second floor and look over onto the scene playing out beneath them.

It is amazing how easy it is to really see the world without you from up there. Sometimes it appears to be better with you removed from it. It seems to function and move differently - more perfectly as laughter and expressions of joy reach you eyes and ears. And you begin to wonder if they even notice that you're not there anymore. If you never came back down you could easily believe your existence insignificant and inconsequential; you could easily see the adaptations as progressions.

However, I truly believe that it is in these moments that it is the most important for you to return to the world from which you came. Because as you descend the stairs you discover just how dysfunctional the world had become without you. It still continues on, to be sure, but not the way it would have had you been there to smooth over the patches that could only be smoothed by you.

So you see, the world will always continue to spin; it is not up to you to make it do so. But you can help it along just by being you within it. And that is honorable too.

Goodnight, dear void.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~ Mary Oliver. Wild geese.