Parts of my life feel tangled right now and I despise a tangle. I am a spiritual weaver, someone who finds patterns comforting in their recognizability, even if they are ugly. Frustratingly, tangles are often each unique and unhappy in their own way, so they take time and patience and the upclose eyesight I am slowly losing to undo. A spiritual way to approach things we despise is to ask what there is to love about them. Ugh. And: what is there to love about a tangle?
A tangle feels like a messy and annoying job that I didn’t ask for. Aren’t so many of the tasks of life like this? We are being asked to do so much, to consume so much – we are overfed but starved. I feel out of practice, even not trained, for what democracy and life are requiring, but that makes it all the more essential to know myself and then take small steps forward. Given all this pressure, of course I want to “get through” tangles and “bad” phases more quickly. I want to get to the good stuff, the better stuff, the stuff I was meant to be doing in my Real Life.
But if the tangle is what’s in front of me – the snarl with no clear paths or patterns – then maybe it is my work. And maybe I don’t get it sorted out, maybe I just work on a part of it. My husband is a great untangler and he often just works on a necklace tangle for a bit and comes back to it later.
Footprints in the Sand
My husband and I are also working our way through Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman. We read one very short chapter a day and discuss when we can – in the tradition of Jimmy and Rosalynn (may we be so fortunate). Day 19 was about the upsides of unpredictability, or embracing the limits to our ability to control.
This sounds like getting comfortable with tangles. Embracing unpredictability is familiar spiritual territory for me. This is what religion is supposed to be about – a presence and a community that invite you back to yourself and beyond yourself, to walk with you through unpredictable and chaotic human life. This is what that Footprints in the Sand plaque in the midwestern bathrooms (why was it always in the bathrooms?!) of my childhood got right! Accurate religious and spiritual communities are not intended to make it all make perfect sense, tell us what to do, or to be a club that offers the easy pass.
Messy Lovable Humans
In the small spiritual life group that I run we recently had a session about grief, which is a tangled and unpredictable process. And yet, because I’ve been reading articles about how we are on the verge of a sea change with AI, and because I saw so much AI advertised on a recent trip to northern California, I appreciated grief even more than I typically do. The promise I am hearing about AI is that it will make everything so much cleaner, so much more predictable, so much more linear. But grief – and humans – are ALWAYS going to be messy. That’s part of our adorable nature. And if we are on the verge of an AI revolution, I am inclined to savor and cherish every bit of the delicious, fallible, stupid humanness around.
That is what there is to love about a tangle. It’s so human to be stuck in something with no clear paths, no patterns, something so messy. We want all of that, because it’s interesting to experience it and it’s art and a game and a perseverance practice to sort it out. Part of the reason I knew I would marry my husband nearly 20 years ago was that I realized I would get to grow and change with him, and he would still love me. Maybe even love me for it. We don’t want static perfection and 100% predictability in our people, in our art, in our lives. It feels cold and dead. As Jason Isbell sings, “If we were vampires…I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand.”
So there is more to love about a tangle than I typically recognize. These are fine ideas and feelings. How do I live them? The words that come to me are “Trust in God but row away from the rocks” (I just Reddited this for the first time and a bunch of other variations came up; an Irish version is “God is good but don’t dance on a small boat” LOL).
Actively Embracing Unpredictability
For me I think this looks like actively embracing unpredictable things instead of gritting my teeth until an event is over and I know how it turned out. I can name several unpredictable things off the top of my head: my kid’s run for class president, loved ones’ fertility journeys, summer travel planning, an upcoming doctor’s appointment, a friend’s love life, the track meet, driving to pick my kids up this afternoon…
This coming month, I am going to make a practice of embracing the unpredictability of everyday things. I will let you know how it goes! Will you tell me some of your thoughts on tangles, on embracing unpredictability, on anything? I love to hear from you (and miss hearing from you, Aunt Lynn). If you listen to the Jason Isbell song, let me know what you think. If you want spiritual homework in movie form, watch the fantastic 1998 movie Pleasantville (which is about so many things, one of which is the soullessness of perfectionism) and let me know what you think!
