Tired & Tried

Tried, soooo tried. I could sleep for two whole days if i could!

Dear Tired. I hear you. How I hear you. We all howl at the same moon and the moon is life and death and our howling is our persistent exhaustion of trying to stay alive and afloat amid of sea of things that are calling out to us. Dear tired, your tiredness is an ancient ache passed down to you from all the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers who have come before you. Of course you are tired.

Every task and every decision and every smile and every wince and every apology and every ‘I love you’ and every ‘I’m sorry’ and every ‘oops’ and every ‘excuse me’ is a rock you have to carry each and every day. Everything has a heaviness. Even joy. Even love. Everything costs something. Everyone extracts something.

Dear Tired, your tiredness is the body aching to be with you again. We give ourselves away, don’t we? I know how the dishes need to be washed and how the kids can’t watch themselves and how the emails don’t send themselves and the snow doesn’t shovel itself but your heartbeat is your own sacred oath to yourself to not only stay alive but to breathe in and out with rest and joy every once and awhile. A friend of mine always says, “those weights aren’t going to lift themselves”—and we know this, yes? What is heavy must be picked up and yet what is heavy always returns back down to earth quickly and heavier than before.

So see, there is no solving the riddle of tired.

I love your perfect typo Tired. Did you notice how in writing tired it became tried. Perhaps it is in the trying where we get wiped by the world. How beautiful it can be to try. How beautiful it can be to let it all go. Perhaps all of us are trying at the wrong things. Perhaps we pick up boulders not meant for us and then we haul them around all day until the back gives. All I know is that there is a lightness of being for each of us, but how to get there, tired and tried as we are?

Perhaps it is like magic or mercy, we cannot earn it—rest, you cannot earn it. These things wait for us to put down the heaviness not meant for us. These things come along and help us carry the weight we cannot put down. It’s all about how we carry things, right? And if we have some company along the way. Maybe if we tried a little harder for the beauty within us and tried a little less to be perfect in the eyes of the world. Maybe if we just asked one friend to do us one favor. Friends love doing favors. Every burden was meant to be a shared one. Notice already how light it can feel, even as it all presses hard down on your back.

If I see you on the path, I will offer you a hand, just as I know you will offer me yours.

—with mercy and love and rest for all that tries you, for your sacred tired-ness that connects to all the bodies of being,

The Complaint Department