I Really Like Mornings
Purpose is the difference between chaos and growth
“She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.”
— Anne Lamott
In the morning, all the things I worried about last night seem silly and ridiculous.
I’m outside.
There’s sunshine, kids’ voices, trees, birds, traffic. Everything seems doable. I’m walking, moving forward literally and metaphorically.
But tonight may bring back the feeling — as it often does so — that everything is wrong and I am wrong and the ways I am wrong that I can’t quite see are the ways that will fuck everything up the most, and it could happen anytime, and it will, and it will come without warning.
There’s another feeling which is like, I don’t know, existential dread bathed in loneliness and then given a shiny shellac coating of guilt.
I try to remember that the feelings come and the feelings go.
Purpose is a context. It’s the difference between chaos and growth.
Change without stability or clarity or direction, change without purpose is chaos. I’ve had enough of that.
Change with purpose, even when it dips and loops and shuffles and circles, goes up and down, one step…