Embrace

 

Charles White, "The Embrace" 1942

The best hugs I ever got were from my niece when she was a little older than a toddler. When she saw me from a distance, she would race toward me and launch herself up into my arms, squeezing fiercely, so that even her eyes and nose screwed up tight. I loved it, her unabashed embrace.

Today's word is Embrace. The last few months have brought so much social and physical distance from loved ones. In part, I choose this word for the longing it represents right now--longing for a time when I can hug my friends and family hard and unabashedly, mask-free.

I choose the word embrace, too, to signify my determination to enter into all of this strange, isolating and isolated experience. I will assume there is value to be found in each of these long days, however long they last. This time of quiet is teaching me much about my own will power (or lack!) and limits. Our shadow side emerges in full force with so much time alone. I embrace this knowledge; it's part of me.

I embrace even the grim realities we currently inhabit. It takes work to understand the vectors of impact around us, the burdens that others carry, from bus drivers to ER doctors to journalists. This work is painful and exhausting, but necessary. I believe we owe it to the human experience to consciously seek to make sense of how and why events evolve as they do--on a micro and macro level, and where we might act meaningfully to make a positive difference. We make choices all the time about how we live and I want to make those choices with the best awareness of impact I can achieve. It's not just about choices, though. It's also about embracing a simple assertion that it is better to know what is happening, even if it's dark, than to remain ignorant.

But mostly, I choose the word Embrace because I feel so powerfully the human-to-human connection in this moment and I want to celebrate that. Amid the fog of daily work and life come moments of a transcendent sense of humanity joined in the same struggle. We always have been struggling to live and live well, but I have never felt so much a part of people I have never met and will never know. John Donne expressed this much better than I ever could in his Meditation XVII, "...any man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind..." All the heavy darkness around makes me want to launch myself at the human race with a hug so fierce like my niece's, fierce enough to burn away at least a fraction of the darkness, the way hers did for me.