There is a You-Shaped Hole in this world
Tue 01 February 2011
, Maurice Eykman, LEAP
The world has a you-shaped hole in it. A beautiful idea we found in a poem by Tara Mohr. It is published in ‘The Real Life’, a collection of eight poems Tara she wrote at her Wise Living blog in 2011, and it’s a New Year’s gift to her readers. If you think you aren’t a poetry fan, try these anyway. They are accessible. They talk like people talk (ish). And they are about the things we are all grappling with. Download it for free at http://wiselivingblog.com/, and if you enjoy, please share with a few people in your life whom you think would enjoy it too.
You-Shaped Hole
Sometimes the world feels inhospitable. You feel all the ways that you and it don’t fit. You see what’s missing, and how it all could be different.
You see alone, it seems, as all the world keeps bustling in the status quo. Working, rushing onto trains, buying dinner groceries, saying goodnight.
And so you feel alone, as if you weren’t meant for the world, or the world wasn’t meant for you. You get timid. You feel lost in wasteful dreams.
You see the world as “the way it is” and your discomfort with it as a problem.
But what if this: You are meant to feel the world is inhospitable, unfriendly, off-track in just the particular ways that you do.
The world has a you-shaped hole in it. It is missing what you see. It lacks what you know.
And so you were called into being to see the gap you see, to feel the pain of it, and to fill it.
Filling it is speaking what is missing. Filling it is stepping into the center of the crowd, into a clearing, and saying, here, my friends, is the future. Filling it is being what is missing, becoming it.
You don’t have to do it all, but you do have to speak it. You have to tell your slice of the truth. You do have to walk toward it with your choices, with your own being.
Then allies and energies will come to you like fireflies swirling around a light.
The roughness of the world, the off-track-ness, the folly that you see, these are the most precious gifts you will receive in this lifetime.
They are not here to distance you from the world, but to you guide you into your contribution to it.
The world was made with a you-shaped hole in it. In seeing that hole, yes, you are alone. But you are alone only until you begin speaking about it loudly, until you take the courageous step.
The world was made with a you-shaped hole in it. In that way you are important. In that way you are here to make the world. In that way you are called.
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