“I love it!”
Gary said this recently about a possibility we had only begun to imagine. I laughed. We hardly knew what it was. There were questions we couldn’t answer, details we hadn’t considered, an entire adventure that had yet to take form. Still, I knew exactly what he meant.
I loved it, too. We didn’t know what it was. We knew how it felt. Maybe fluency begins there.
The Feeling Under the Feeling
“What are you feeling?”
My art teacher asks me to paint it. My movement teachers ask me to let it move. And my journal asks me to put it into words. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can’t.
I have spent thirty-seven years with a Frenchman and many years studying French. I understand quite a lot, but I am not fluent. Neither is Gary in English.
We notice it especially with humor. I can understand every word and still miss the joke. He can understand the joke and miss the wink beneath it.
Nuance doesn’t always translate. Feelings have nuances, too.
We reach for the words we know: excited, afraid, joyful, sad, nervous, hopeful. The word may be true without telling the whole truth.
Fear can accompany a yes. Excitement can accompany a no. Grief can carry immeasurable love. Sometimes the deepest answer is simply not yet or I don’t know yet.
You may know the feeling. Everything looks right, but something in you hesitates. Or you have every reason to be afraid, yet beneath the fear is an unmistakable yes.
We may not have the words and still understand what something means.
The heart is often fluent before the mind learns the language.
The heart doesn’t require a perfect translation to make itself understood.
Maybe fluency isn’t being able to name every feeling. It is understanding the nuance, listening beyond what we can readily name for the knowing underneath.
We can begin with: What am I feeling?
Then listen a little longer.
What do I know underneath the feeling?
What is it asking of me?
Fluency
A lifetime gives us plenty of practice. We begin to recognize the language of our own hearts: what yes feels like, what no feels like, what this matters feels like. Feeling doesn’t guarantee an outcome. We can be uncertain about the form and certain about the feeling.
Long before we can explain why we love someone, something in us may already be leaning toward them. Before we can make the case for a possibility, we may feel ourselves come alive in its presence. The mind may still want more information while the heart has already caught the nuance.
The knowing underneath isn’t knowledge of the future. It is knowledge of ourselves.
We don’t know where the road leads. We recognize something about who we are when we stand before it. Sometimes that is enough to take the next step.
After trying to put that still-unfolding possibility and all its feelings into words, I wrote this in my journal:
This or something better.
And love leads the way.