Keep Feeling, Keep Going

When I was ten, my mother took me to see The Nutcracker. The girl playing Clara was a family friend. I fell in love with her so hard it hurt. I’m serious. The next day my stomach felt bruised from the inside. I remember thinking: Is this what love is, feeling sick?

When I was fourteen, I kissed a girl named Caroline. It was the day before Christmas Eve. We stood outside in the cold so her parents wouldn’t find out. She knew all the words to “Bleecker Street” by Simon and Garfunkel. We sang it a cappella. Then we kissed. I never saw Caroline again, but I still remember how long it took my face to get warm afterward.

My associations with Christmas mostly involve a certain kind of loss or emptiness. I’m sure some of that comes from being Jewish, but many of my Christian friends say they feel it too. This time of year, a silence settles over the world. It feels hollow, but warm. Lonely, but holy.

I think the opening of the heart always hurts a little. Not the senseless pain pop songs sing about, but the pressure of something widening before we’re ready. To feel something fully is to feel the moment it starts to leave. Even as it’s happening, it’s already becoming memory.

This time of year, people often say it’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling. But "okay" isn’t quite the right word. What you’re feeling is more than okay — it’s a doorway to love, to growth. If an old song makes you smile, if your insides feel bruised, if you miss a person you never really knew, stay with it. Keep feeling. But also, keep going. Don’t clench up around analysis or interpretation. Just let it all pass through you.

Keep feeling, keep going. There’s a secret logic moving us through memory, into loss, and then into love. If we don’t turn away, something marvelous will appear. Not a happy ending. Not certainty. But a kind of quiet that’s very full. A silence that can hold everything that's already slipped through our hands.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, "Swan Lake Rehearsal" (1930)