In Hand

A chair wobbled at my kitchen table this week. The screwdriver sat in the drawer. Before I opened it, I pictured a better set, sharper bits, and a handsome case with every size in its place.

The picture felt good. I didn’t fix the chair.

I look at my computer and decide I need a newer machine. I hold my guitar and decide the music needs better wood, better strings, some future version of me.

What Is Already Here

I used to wait until I felt ready before acting. That feeling hid for a long time. I kept telling myself I was becoming the person I wanted to be, I was quitting the bad habit I couldn’t stop, always around the next corner, tomorrow morning, or just beyond the horizon.

Then I realized I would never stop becoming until I decided to actually BE.

For me, faith is having a clear mind and a strong heart. What I can conceive and bring myself to believe, I can achieve: a turned screw, a paragraph, a chord that stops feeling strange in the hand. The ordinary things around me need no ceremony. They wait for patient attention.

My responsibility is small. My domain is tight. I give my attention only to those things that I can actually touch, affect, control.

I can’t manage the timing of the world, other people’s feelings, or the shape that work may take after it leaves me. Those things sit outside my little domain. We have to let go when we have no control.

My domain is my focus, and I surrender everything outside of my control to the friendly universe we live in that always has our backs.