Invincibility allows for a certain kind of risk-taking. This is the business-book version. The “I’ll just build it back better” version. The confidence of someone who assumes there will always be more chips to play.
But there’s another kind of risk. One that is harder earned. It’s the risk that comes after you know how fragile things are.
After illness or a heartbreak of any kind. After watching something you loved unravel in your hands. When you’ve already seen how fragile everything is—the body, the plan, the future you assumed was guaranteed—and you choose to try anyway.
Some people’s reality meter is turned down wayyyy too low. They need to believe the world is wide open. That they are the master of their fate, captains of their soul, etc. etc.
Other people have the dial turned up so high they can barely move. Why try? What’s the point? Everything breaks in the end.
I wish we talked more about that dial.
I’m not describing bravado. Or the fantasy that nothing bad will happen.
I mean the opposite.
It’s the acceptance that something bad might happen. And strangely, a high tolerance for fragility can make you…braver.
When you stop pretending the world is sturdy, you stop being shocked by its instability. You stop organizing your life around avoiding loss at all costs. You understand that precarity is the precondition for love. For art. For parenthood. For friendship. For any beautiful thing.
The people I admire most are not the ones who believe they cannot be broken.
They are the ones who know they can be.
And still they open their hearts to something new.
May you welcome joy even when it cannot be kept.
And when the world feels breakable, may your heart stay open anyway.
If you imagine that dial in your life—the one that measures how fragile things feel—where is yours set these days? How do you notice it affecting what feels possible?
Kate, I’m grateful to you for this piece — and for the whole Lenten series.
The question of accepting fragility has been with me for years. I try to come to terms with reality — with the fact that in this life I can only control (and even that in a limited way) my responses to what it brings.
I am learning to give myself permission to plan for the future and to dream, while at the same time accepting that something entirely different may happen — and even that the end may come now, not in decades.
And yet, just when it seems that I am close to this kind of acceptance, something appears — on my shoulder, or deep in my stomach — a feeling that says: “you are trying to deceive yourself and others that you have really let go of control.”
In those moments, I try to remind myself that this too is okay.
Because here on earth, “our hearts are restless” — and that restlessness is part of the beauty of our lives.
Cancer is an ugly word
and an ugly place to be,
pierced by rusted filthy sword
with no place to which to flee
except into the arms of beauty
that embrace when I create
something fine, a Bird Of Duty
that pulls me from cloacal fate
and gives a sparkle to the day
full aromatic with the grace
of being joyful, anyway,
a pained bright smile upon its face
which, while seeing that all hope is lost
will not deign stop to count the cost.
***
Cancer is a revolting, nasty process, and the end to which I go is a place in which I ask that you would not visit me; the shame for that which is lost is more than I can bear.
And yet...each moment allows for the creation of something fine, a word, a thought, a kindness, that transcends this loathsome fetid swamp, that admits the Breath Of Heaven...
...and I am thus transformed.