Scott Edgar (00:00.91)
Welcome back to The Poet Delayed. My name is Scott. I am the host and I'm glad to be back. It's been a few months since I last published an episode and I'm pretty excited because I've got some episodes lined up that I'm looking forward to diving into with you guys. I've spoken to some people to be guests and to have some great, I think we're going have some great conversations. And so I'm excited. It's been a while and I'm just excited to get back into it.

Today's episode actually is part one of two. I came across a line the other morning when I was reading the works of Michel de Montaigne, a 16th century French philosopher. And as I read the line, it kind of made me think about this unconscious belief that I think I've carried with me much of my life and kind of quietly, almost under everything. And it's this.

that if life is hard, then something must be wrong. That if things aren't working, if I feel overwhelmed, if I'm losing something, if I'm struggling, then I must be failing, or life is failing me. And I think, I don't think I'm alone in that. I think most of us carry that assumption to one degree or another, that life is supposed to stabilize, that it's supposed to smooth out, that if we do things just right, we'll arrive somewhere and finally be able to say,

Okay, now it works. But that's not how life works. And I think about this metaphor. If you set up to cross the ocean, you don't expect still water. You expect waves, you expect storms, you expect resistance. So when those things come, you don't say something's gone wrong with the ocean. You just acknowledge and you say, okay, this is the ocean.

You expect it, and here it is. It's just what the ocean does.

Scott Edgar (02:03.298)
But in our lives, it seems like we do the opposite. We encounter waves and we think something's wrong. We encounter loss and we think something is broken. We feel pressure, confusion, uncertainty, and we think, I shouldn't feel this way. But what if that's actually not true? What if what's true with the ocean is also true with life? Here's what Montaigne wrote that I came across. He wrote,

Do not die of being sick. You die of being alive. And that can sound strange at first. When I first read it, had to sit with it for a little bit. But what he's pointing to is this, that the only reason we die is because we are alive. Life itself is the condition. And everything that comes with it, sickness, loss, uncertainty, aging, those aren't separate from life. They're part of life.

They don't interrupt life. express it because to be alive is to change. To be alive is to wear down, to be alive is to lose things you love. So when those things happen, it doesn't mean something has gone wrong. It just means life is happening. Nothing has gone wrong. It just doesn't look like the way I thought it would. I wrote a haiku a while back that this, all of this brought to my mind. The haiku reads pain.

is part of life.

To avoid it is a death. Find meaning instead. That second line, to avoid it is a death.

Scott Edgar (03:43.694)
I think about that a lot.

Scott Edgar (03:48.684)
And I think about the reason that we avoid it. Like when we try to avoid pain, that's avoiding part of life. So we're shutting down and we're, however we do it, how, mechanism we use to avoid pain, that's shutting us down, our life down a bit. And we're missing part of life. And I think the reason that we avoid.

death or pain rather, or that we try to avoid pain is because we're afraid of it. Because I know that's what I've done. And I think that's what we do a lot. When life feels heavy, when something uncertain is coming, when we feel something we don't want to feel, we move away from it. And that movement is, I think at the heart, driven by fear. Not always obvious fear. Sometimes it's subtle. It looks like

putting something off, avoiding a conversation, scrolling instead of sitting with something, overthinking instead of acting. But underneath all of it, it's the same thing. Fear. Fear of what might happen. Fear of what we might feel. Fear of what it might mean. And so we move away or we try to avoid that painful situation. We run or we freeze. I wrote about this in a poem that I've referenced a lot titled Terrible Potential.

At the time I wrote it, I didn't quite fully understand what I was writing. But looking back, I think I was describing this exact pattern. I wrote that I ran as fast as my child's stride could take me, not even knowing what it was, only that it was coming. That's fear. That is fear. Something's wrong. Something's coming. I don't even know what it is, but I can feel it. So I move away from it and I avoid it.

and I keep moving until I forget why I'm even running.

Scott Edgar (05:52.12)
But the thing is, it doesn't go away. It just follows. And eventually it closes the gap.

And that's the moment I think that matters because the problem was never the thing itself. The problem was that I abandoned myself while it was happening. I left myself. I abandoned myself in the middle of it. There's another poem I wrote titled On Being a River. I wrote this concept or this idea in it. I wrote, flow like a river, dynamic and full of power. Cut your own course as you go.

And that kind of expresses what, how I want to approach, how I want to, confront these types of situations. Cause a river doesn't expect smooth terrain. doesn't resist resistance. meets it and boulders don't stop the river. shape it. That's the concept. The boulders don't stop the river. They shape it. The river will either a road, the boulder, or it'll go around the boulder. It'll cut through the.

terrain. In the poem I wrote that the river, well, I wrote, if you encounter boulders, move aside the boulders, break them apart, make them part of you. And that's life. That's how I want to approach these types of situations. The obstacles are not separate from the path. They are the path. And that's the idea. Instead of running, confront the obstacles.

But when I'm in fear, I don't move like a river. I don't, I stop. Or I run away from the obstacle. And both of those are fear responses. And that's where something deeper starts to happen because Montaigne is right. I believe that he's right. We do not die of being sick. We die of being alive, meaning the things, these things, pain, loss, uncertainty, they're part of life, as we said.

Scott Edgar (07:58.04)
They don't mean that something is broken. They don't mean I'm failing.

But there is another way to die. And that's the kind of the point I'm getting at here. There's another way to die, not physically, but internally. Because when I believe that these things do mean that something is wrong, when I look at them and think, OK, my life is broken, when I see struggle as failure, when I see pain as something that shouldn't be happening, then what I do is I respond in fear. And when I respond in fear, I abandon myself. I avoid.

I run, I freeze. And in doing that, I leave my life. My body is still here. My heart is still beating, but I'm not really living. I'm waiting, I'm hiding, I'm holding back. And I felt that many times. I've laid awake at night thinking, what if I get to the end of my life and realize I was here, but I never really lived it. I avoided it. I stayed small inside it.

I spent my life trying not to feel it instead of actually living it. And that's the irony because Montana's right. I won't die of being sick. I won't die of being sick. But if I fear sickness, if I treat it like failure, if I try to avoid everything that feels uncertain or painful, then in a very real sense, I do die of those things, not physically, but inwardly.

And that's what the haiku points to. Pain is part of life. To avoid it is a death. Find meaning instead. Because, let me read that one more time. Pain is part of life. To avoid it is a death. Find meaning instead.

Scott Edgar (09:51.01)
Because when I avoid life, I don't protect myself. I lose myself. And that's the real danger. It's not the wave. It's not the wind. It's not even the size of the storm. It's that moment where I stop moving, where I freeze, or I run, and I don't adjust the sail. I don't shift direction. I don't act. I just absorb it or avoid it.

Scott Edgar (10:15.444)
In another haiku, I wrote, life gives us mountains. Some souls stop and some souls climb. You know, mountain tops. So life gives us mountains. Some souls stop and some souls climb. You know, mountain tops. The mountain isn't the problem. That's not the problem. That's the obstacle. It's not the problem. Stopping is the problem.

And I've stopped many times. Not physically necessarily, although sometimes physically, but internally. I've paused my life, waiting for things to feel easier. But the thing is, life doesn't wait, it keeps moving. And if I'm not moving with it, I start to lose something. Not out there, but in here in my heart. And that's what I'm starting to see more clearly, that the real danger in life is not pain.

It's not struggle. It's not uncertainty. It's not loss. The real danger is fear and what fear leads me to do.

to run, to freeze, abandon myself in the middle of my own life.

Scott Edgar (11:37.312)
And I think that's where the work is, not in eliminating the storm, but in learning how to stay and move inside of it.

Scott Edgar (11:50.528)
And in the next episode, that's what I want to talk about. Things that I'm learning to move inside of it. Cause I'm still learning that how not to run, how not to freeze, how to stay with myself and move forward. Anyway, I don't have it all figured out, but I'm starting to figure it out. I feel like I'm in a much better place than I was even a year ago.

Scott Edgar (12:14.958)
And I think that that's where all of this goes. It's realizing and understanding the obstacles and then learning how to move through the obstacles. And that's what I want to talk about in the next episode is ways that I'm learning to move through the obstacles.

Scott Edgar (12:36.692)
I appreciate you listening today. you've enjoyed this episode, if you feel like it's helpful to you, I would encourage you to share it. And as always, just a reminder, may IBI is the only prayer. Thank you.