Don't Settle

"People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." Ralph Waldo Emerson

We have no choice but to stray from childhood. We grow up. We gain years. We look around, glimpsing the world that might just be ours, the life that we might just live, the self we might just become. Maturity settles like fog, gray and humbling. We find ourselves wanting things: Safety. Security.

We want to be settled.

And then some of us get there. Here. To stable ground. And in the stillness of our standing, we see flashes of what we have left behind: Rumbling chaos of heart and mind. Exquisite uncertainty. Jagged pieces of self, scattered, scintillating. We tell ourselves that we are thankful. Thankful that we are now here. Settled.

But in truth, some of us know. Some of us are brave enough to know. That progress is rooted in rubble. That hope lingers in movement. That there is an incomparable fertility in being unsettled. And so. Those of us who are honest, who are aware, or just think too much, realize something, something we are hesitant to admit: We miss being uncertain, unsure, unsettled.

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How can we stay settled, snug in our tidy adult lives, while also retaining the glorious chaos of childhood and becoming, of who we once were? Can we really have both or must we choose? Is there a way to preserve an unsettled and searching core within an outwardly settled existence?