“I’m...stuck.”

Ask me how I am these days and this is what I say. “I’m feeling stuck.”

It’s not a Terrible Stuck. It’s not an Up-To-My-Eyelashes-in-Garbage Stuck or a I-Have-To-Burn-Everything-Down Stuck. On the contrary. Things are good. I am fine. I love my work. I love my life.

And. I feel just kind of stuck in all of that good fineness.

While things are all good and fine, I feel a pull toward something outside my normal wonderful life. Something that pushes my edges some – but not too much. It’s audacious, to ask for more from this place. As odd as it sounds, I feel stuck in a life I adore.

And even as I write this, “stuck” isn’t exactly it.

I feel stuck. And at the same time, I feel things slipping away.

It’s a paradox: stuck and static and at the same time, things I love, treasure and value are slipping from me like water through my fingers.

Injury and age are changing my body. Children are grown and gone. Contemporaries are dying. Beloveds grapple with diagnoses and treatments and reduced capacities. The hole left by the global pandemic still gapes open.

Time. People. My body. Life. Slipping past me like a fast-moving river slipping around a stone.

When I first recognize this feeling of stuck and slipping, I want to change it – fast. Gripped with a scrambly, panicky sense that I need to add something, do something, fix this odd-feeling mess.

Buddhist teachings point to this reflexive resistance and grasping as the root of all suffering. It’s sometimes called the second arrow, when something hurts (the first arrow) and then our minds blame ourselves for not being able to change it (the second arrow). My panicked scramble only makes an uncomfortable situation worse.

When I feel the buzz of resistance and the contraction of grasping, I’ve taken to lying down on my office floor. I unroll myself onto the blue octopus rug like a human yoga mat.

And I lie there.

It doesn’t take long. Just a few minutes and I can see that this very moment is fine. I’m not in danger. I am OK. I’m simply in the interim time – the place of no longer and not yet.

John O’Donohue captures it in his poem For The Interim Time from his book To Bless The Space Between Us:

No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely in-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come.
...
You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.

"The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born."

What if, I ask myself, I could just sit in this in-between space? Intellectually, I know it is fertile territory if I can only relax enough to stay here.

A friend reminds me that everything is part of life’s flow – the movement, the stillness, the stuck, the slipping, the water, the stones – everything. The stuckness is an illusion since everything is always changing. And since everything is always changing, everything is always slipping away. It’s all the same flow.

So maybe I’m stuck and everything’s slipping away or maybe I’m a smooth stone in the middle of the river. Maybe I’m being changed and moved in ways I cannot see. Maybe I’m part of what is making the flow move in the way it does.

Near the end of his poem, O’Donohue offers reassurance:

What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become

So for now, I’ll be on the rug on my office floor, holding space for that which is no longer and not yet.

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