I Am Trying

My whole life, or so it seems, people have told me to relax. Just “go with the flow,” they’d say. To which I’d reply with a doubtful laugh and an, "Oh I know, I am trying."

In my mind this seemed like such a lame response. I really was trying to relax, but I didn’t know how. What did that mean really…to go with the flow? And how on earth did you really do it? In the same way people have marveled over the years at how my hair can be so naturally curly and red, I have been equally perplexed by other’s lackadaisical attitudes about life. You know those people we all want to be more like, who just never seem to get rattled by any of life’s twists and turns. They just continue floating right along, taking it all in stride. (My father is one of these people. I used to think he was just always high on coffee, which he probably was working so much, co-raising three kids and running a small pig farm just for fun. Turns out, I now understand that he’s a genuine roll-with-the-flow kind of guy.)

To me, the word, “try,” itself was a crutch. How, my left-brain wondered, could you try to do anything? You either did it or you didn’t. Could you try to pick up a pen? Try to put on a shirt? But maybe that was my problem in and of itself. Black. White. Right. Wrong. Good. Bad. This was how I had always lived my life, which, as I found, was really a hard way to process the world. It left me no gray space in which to float, roam, flow, relax. Rather, I wracked my brain trying to do it all. Trying to be "perfect." And trying to logically process every last detail of my experience.

According to Merriam Webster, the definition of “try” (in addition to the three legal ones) is: "to extract or clarify (as lard) by melting; and to make an effort to do something." Until now, I’d never associated my phrase of, “I am trying,” as melting or clarifying. I’d always thought of it as the second definition…making an effort.

Oftentimes though instead of living within life’s flow, all of my trying left me flailing about. In my own way, I really was trying. It’s just that I was getting nowhere. So that’s when I began trying a little harder. I began consciously dissolving that lard I no longer needed. I began extracting the corpulence that had kept me stuck. And it was only through that process of dissolving the lard that I could move on to smoother, calmer waters.

Over the past year, I feel like I’ve melted enough fat that one might think I would be shredded to merely bone and muscle. In fact, one night recently in the still, quiet space of my living room, I was having a huge trying moment. Thinking I was going mad, I text messaged my friend Julie Anne, asking how to push through this meltdown. Because in making such a huge effort to keep it all together in my little black-and-white boxes, I still didn’t fully comprehend the importance of such times. I viewed them as weakness. I felt a vulnerability and rawness to layers of myself I hadn’t been previously introduced to, nor did I really want to meet now. In her sweetness, Julie Anne simply replied, “well, what are you melting down?” Her response stopped me cold, and I laughed audibly. I had been completely unaware of my choice of words, yet that’s exactly what I was doing. I was trying.

For as uncomfortable as those moments of melting down are, they are the flow that carries us forward. For it is in the melting down that we are at our most vulnerable. We are forced into submission. There’s no choice but to give into the experience, to surrender. And it is in those delicious moments that we are most pregnable. We are the most open to the bounty of goodness the universe has to reveal to us, and it is then that we are truly swept into the flow of life.

So I say now in confidence and with a heart full of hope, love and gratitude. I am trying, damn it. I am trying my hardest.