Where darkness was I look upon the light

I can keep looking at the place where something went wrong long after the situation has changed.

The mind returns to the careless sentence, the disappointing decision, or the moment I wish I had handled differently. It studies the darkness as though enough attention might finally explain it away.

I remember revisiting a room after a difficult conversation had taken place there. Nothing in the room was unusual, yet my attention went immediately to where each person had been sitting and what had been said.

The room had become a container for the memory.

Then I noticed what was also there. Morning light came through the window. Someone had placed fresh flowers on the table. Life had continued in the same space where I believed only the painful moment remained.

Looking upon the light did not require me to call the conversation harmless. It meant allowing the place, the people involved, and myself to become more than the worst thing I remembered there.

Fear isolates one frame and calls it the whole story.

Light restores movement.

Today I want to notice where I am still staring at what happened as though nothing else has happened since.

There may be repair to make or grief that still needs room.

But the light does not wait for the past to disappear.

It enters the place where darkness was and shows me that darkness is no longer all that is there.