Necessary Confusion (Poem)
(excuse the lack of spacing, medium does not allow for it…)
There is purpose in feeling purposeless,
There is necessity in not knowing,
There is clarity in prolonged confusion,
Do not wait in pain unnecessarily,
Especially if it is going to kill you
However,
Vulnerability,
The admittance to not knowing
Being totally lost,
With no immediate way out
To express,
To admit,
“I don’t know”
Is courage,
And courage rarely feels good.
To wait in the liminal space,
The terror of neither here nor there,
The known that loses itself into the unknown,
The foreboding space of in-between,
Inbetween places that you are yet to know
It is all necessary, friend
The pain, the agitation,
The sorrow, confusion,
The loss of all that you had to gain,
Sometimes you find yourself,
Through no choice of your own,
Flung into the depths of the ocean,
Stripped of your certainty, comforts,
With no knowing of rescue or sanctuary
No matter the incessant pressure of society
The notion that discomfort is bad,
That we are wrong for having it,
That we are missing the hack, the trick, the method,
The outpouring of strategies we just need to try harder at
It’s just another juice cleanse,
Ignorant to the totality,
The wholesome, dirty, joyful, messiness
Of being a human,
Of which many periods;
Are absent of knowing
We pretend to know,
We vocalise our certainty,
We cling to our knowledge,
We refrain from admitting the truth,
I don’t know
You can swim as fast as you like,
And sometimes that’s necessary,
Because that’s what you do
But sometimes,
Sometimes we need to float,
In the agonising messiness,
The vulnerable openness,
To not having the answer.
Courage;
“To speak with your whole heart”
And the heart is hard to translate,
When we spend our lives shutting it down.
Sometimes we just need to wait,
No matter how restless it is.
Do not wait in pain,
But,
If the thing that’s killing you,
Is your running from the pain,
Then float, my friend.
Float in the ugliness.
There is comfort in admittance,
Sanctuary in surrender,
Certainty in not knowing,
Courage in deep vulnerability.
_____
