We are all far more capable than we know.
I’m starting to think we have infinite capacity to carry the impossible, to survive the unthinkable, to bear the unbearable.
I was listening to a client express that perhaps she was resistant to facing some issues because she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to handle them.
And I heard myself say to her, “The capacity to handle these issues comes as you handle them. Our fear is connected to our past, when we didn’t have the capacity. But our present self and our future self has more capacity than our past self. Our human development never ends. We always have the opportunity to be growing and gaining more capacity. When an issue presents itself, and we step forward to bear it, we gain the capacity to bear it.”
One of the biggest fears I had after Libby died was that I would fall under the weight of my grief and be crushed. I had just come to a place of deep awareness of progress I’d made after years of work, and I was afraid that all my work would have been for nothing, because nothing could have prepared me to deal with the death of my daughter.
But what I said to my client, I have found to be true.
Whatever comes, we step forward into it, and we gain the capacity to bear it.
The agony is real and intense.
And somehow our capacity to bear up under it is infinite, it seems.
We are far more capable than we knew.
Or ever wanted to be.