By Amaya Gayle Gregory
What’s going to happen is going to happen, including all the actions I am going to take or not take. Perhaps more importantly, what’s happening is what’s happening and there is nothing I can do about what’s here right now. Despite these material realities, or at least my realities, I occasionally find myself a bit jazzed, or a lot, and experience anticipatory dread. I hear it’s going around these days.
My anticipatory dread doesn’t change a damn thing. I know that, grok it absolutely, but it still appears. That’s life. Whether it’s mine or the collective’s doesn’t really matter. Being an empath, I feel it, so really, who cares whose it is.
Now some would point to the dread, and call it good. They might believe that dread is motivational, a moving force for powerful new actions. They may even presume that those actions will help change the future, making it better. I’d have to point out—you know me, I’m a troublemaker—that better is relative depending on whose side you sit. For some of us, all the protesters sitting down and giving up would be their idea of better.
Others would undoubtedly say this silly dread is messing with my happiness and peace, although they would be wrong, at least in my case. Dread doesn’t necessarily mean unhappiness and peacelessness. It can simply be a noticeable belly knot, a catch in the breath, a desire to pull up the covers and snuggle in with the dog for an extra hour.
When I don’t mind that dread appears, it is just a passing sensation, a story that floats on by, not picked up and added to, a need that doesn’t quite become needed, a bit of anger that doesn’t rise to the bait.
I think that’s the trick these days, or at least it is for me. I am going to do what I am going to do. I’ll write. I’ll show up. I’ll stand up. I’ll make love visible as best I can. I will be real. But I don’t need to go off my own deep end in the process. I don’t need to panic, get angry or hostile about it or be compulsively driven to check the news, the headlines, the latest blog. I don’t need to drown myself in the world’s sorrows in order to prove I care and even if I did, I wouldn’t be of much use to anyone, myself included.
I know it’s mortifying, that people are suffering, that targets are being painted on people’s backs, that many are running scared, afraid they’ll be next, and they may be right, but it still comes down to what am I going to do about it right now. If that is nothing but being real, opening my heart a bit wider, a bit wiser, and letting more of the world in, so be it. I don’t need to do anything but what I am doing in this moment. What I am doing in the next moment will take care of itself. It always does.
When I genuinely listen to my inner knowing, I am pointed in the direction of my next step and I take it without a big production, without the inner argument, without doubt or certainty. Not resisting the universal pull, I simply take it.
Having compassion for the whole, remaining open to being of good use, and effortlessly acknowledging that life uses me as it wills, I am appropriately moved … in perfect timing, to the exact situation that calls for my talents. I don’t have to know anything. I don’t have to figure it out. All I need is to be clear that I care and that I am available and willing. It’s that simple.
I don’t need to let this world beat me down or tear me up. If it’s going to do that, it will and I will deal with it then. You know, that’s one of the big ones for me: not wanting to feel the downfall of human kindness, not wanting to be so very wrong about the love we are capable of sharing, the goodness at our core.
So, what do I do? I let it in. I feel the failure of compassion. I experience the collapse of kindness, and let it be as it will be.
There is but one solution I have found to the dread and that is inviting it in, giving it a place at the table, feeling it, embracing all the possibilities. Anything is possible. Dread is not wanting it to be as it is, or as we think it might turn out. Dread, like fear, when met, does not create more of the same, does not make the possibility more probable. It dissolves into stunningly vivid appreciation of our humanity. It opens the channels for energy to flow freely into the unwinding patterns of life.
Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY