Scott Edgar (00:02.124)
Welcome back to the poet delayed. My name is Scott. the host and today's podcast is based off a haiku. wrote a few months ago. The haiku reads the cold, dark morning whispers, cancel all your plans. He puts on his coat. And I know at first glance, it sounds like it's a, just a haiku about a morning, not wanting to get out of bed on a cold morning. And it certainly can apply to that.

But it's more than about mourning. It's about the moments in life when something inside whispers to stay down or whispers that you can't handle this or just go back to sleep, whether it's figuratively or literally. And what makes the whisper dangerous, has been my experience, is that it doesn't arrive loudly. It's quiet. And in a life that's already feeling overwhelming, a life that's chaotic or exhausting,

the quiet voice can feel like relief or peace.

You know, there times when everything inside you feels loud. And in those moments, anything soft feels trustworthy.

So the whisperer says, just let go or withdraw. Stop trying, stay down. And when we're grieving or exhausted or anxious, when we're heartbroken or just simply caring too much for too long, the whisper can sound almost merciful. Because when those burdens settle on us, the grief, exhaustion, the heartbreak, the depression, the weight of too much for too long, when those burdens settle on us, they do more than just hurt.

Scott Edgar (01:43.726)
hurt us. At least it's been my experience. They alter perception. They make temporary pain feel permanent. And so in that situation, surrender feels reasonable and numbness feels like healing. The other thing is they, make, they can make joy feel false. That's been my experience a lot. Not, just distant, but undesirable. There's times when happiness itself feels repulsive and hope.

feels shallow. And if you know that feeling, if you've experienced that, then you know how persuasive it can be. Suffering has the power to alter perception. And it's in that altered perception that the whisper finds its strength.

But over time, I've been learning something important. And this is it. The pain may be real, the grief may be real, and the exhaustion may be real. But the conclusions that those feelings hand me, those are not always true. That's what I've been learning.

I've had mornings where everything in me said that nothing good is ahead. There's no good thing coming. Everything headed your way is going to be a disaster. It's going to be a problem. You are going to suffer. Nothing meaningful remains. There's no joy worth reaching for.

Scott Edgar (03:14.008)
but I get up and I have to go, I have to move. And I've noticed that I find meaning again. I find gratitude. There's some measure of peace. And I remember that life was larger than that moment where I felt like nothing good was coming. So the question is what changed? Usually reality did not change. There are problems still there.

Maybe I'm still grieving. The grief is still there. Maybe I lost it. The loss is still there. But the difference was that I had gotten up and I had moved and maybe only a little bit, maybe only enough to interrupt the panic. But because I moved, my nervous system was able to settle and the sense of threat eased. And because of that is able to see more clearly again. And that distinction has become very important to me. Movement.

doesn't necessarily change the world. doesn't change reality, but it changes our ability to see the world clearly. Because the reality, the pain and the suffering, as I mentioned earlier, that has a tendency to,

to distort reality. And the movement, I think, helps us see reality clearly. I wrote a poem about this a few years ago titled Perspective. It reads, the sun goes down but will not go away, and the darkness will not stay. But it is here now and covers all as the light did the day. Otherwise, all things are the same.

When the sun goes down, the world doesn't disappear. We know that. mean, that's, I don't have to explain that, but the, roads are still there. The mountains are still there. The trees are there. Your house is there. The only thing that changed was visibility. And I think inwardly something similar happens because sometimes darkness, depression, grief, covers things.

Scott Edgar (05:23.202)
but it doesn't erase them. Joy still exists. There's still possibilities. Resources still exist. Directions still exist. You just may not be able to see it clearly right now. And that's the problem, not the reality. And I tried to express this in another haiku that reads, Fog obscures the sun, yet the sun is there and joy exists in sorrow.

I love that. I read a lot because it reminds me that obscurity is not absence. So the fog can hide the sun, but we know that it doesn't extinguish the sun. The sun still exists. So sorrow can exist beside joy in ways we don't always understand. There are seasons where both are true at once. Pain is present and still something good remains. There's still hope. There's still joy.

The trouble is, as I mentioned earlier, suffering can make us forget it. And when that altered vision lasts too long, then another danger threatens. And that danger is that we begin to fold inward. It begins to feel like it's too much. And so we become small and we begin to shrink. Our world gets smaller and we stop imagining anything new can be created. We stop participating. And so the desire to keep going or participating

in day to day life diminishes. That's the risk. If that altered vision, if that altered reality continues too long. The poet Rilke seemed to understand this. He wrote in the first Duino elegy, he wrote, but nature spent and exhausted takes lovers back into herself as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time.

that one more time. But nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back into herself as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time. I love that line.

Scott Edgar (07:37.014)
It's such a precise description of what exhaustion does to the human spirit, in my opinion. When life is spent, it folds inward.

Scott Edgar (07:47.982)
And I think we do that too. When we're depleted, we stop building and begin merely accepting. We settle for whatever feels nearest and warmest, maybe whatever is just given to us. We settle for things we don't have to work for. Sometimes we settle for numbness, sometimes cynicism, sometimes distraction. And I mentioned numbness because numbness feels easier than joy. Just not feel.

Joy asks openness, asks for movement, asks for participation, but numbness asks for almost nothing. And that's why I don't think the answer is pretending everything is fine or simply choosing happiness. Maybe that works sometimes. Maybe that's a little a primer that we can use sometimes, maybe so. But there are times when the very thought of happiness feels far away or even repulsive, as I mentioned earlier. I mean, there are times when I don't want to feel good. There are times when I want to fold in.

And so the idea that, yeah, just be happy. No, I don't want to be happy. There are mornings when joy does not motivate me at all. And there are seasons and times when I don't want inspiration.

Some mornings are just hard and there are some long seasons that just hurt. Grief can't be rushed. We have to sit in it. We have to sit through it. There's no shortcut to grief, no effective shortcut at least, not without, not without coping mechanisms that don't really work. You have to go through grief.

So in those moments, I may not be able to choose joy. It may not be an option on the table. But there's one thing that I can do is just to remind myself that this is to just move. I can still move. Even in pain, movement can still matter. And I'm not talking about dramatic movement. I'm not talking about solving your whole life before noon, but just enough movement to interrupt the spell. And I use that word spell for a reason because that's

Scott Edgar (09:59.81)
what I feel it is because I don't see things clearly. I don't see things as they really are.

It's like a spell. That's why I love the final line of the haiku. reads, he puts on his coat. There's no speech. There's no certainty. There's no once more unto the breach, dear friends. There's no burst of inspiration. He just simply moves. He does something simple. And I found, I found that life often meets us after movement, not before it. And sometimes movement is literal.

You get up, you shower, or you step outside for a minute. You let the cold air hit your face. You feel the earth under your feet, or you just move. You call a friend, or you just take a walk or something. But sometimes putting on your coat means regaining your bearings. Because when I feel overwhelmed, it's not only that life is hard. It's that everything starts to feel shapeless. There's loose ends, vague threats. There are problems that don't have edges, or I don't see the edges.

Everything just blends into one dark mass. And my nervous system struggles with that. In a recent episode, I talked about the difference between sleeping outside in the open and sleeping in the cabin. That same idea comes into play here. Outside, every sound matters. Anything could come from anywhere. There are no clear boundaries. So my nervous system is on high alert, but inside a cabin,

The walls change everything. They don't eliminate the forest, but they create limits within it. And they give shape to uncertainty. They give limits to threats. And often, that's what I need inwardly. Not answers, but edges. So sometimes putting on my coat means sitting down and taking inventory, not attacking my whole life or fixing everything today, just looking at what is actually there.

Scott Edgar (12:04.322)
Is there something that needs attention now? Are there things that I'm worried about that can wait? What things are out of my control? What things can I handle? What resources do I have? And this one is their fear that I'm carrying that's not even real.

Sometimes I don't need to fix my life. What I need is just to know where I am in it. And my experience has been that the first relief from chaos is not resolution. Instead, it's orientation. Where am I? What's the lay of the land? like, like, like, what I like to say is gather my loaves and fishes. So real code gives another line.

in that same elegy and the Duino Elegy, the first one. And here's what he writes. begin again and again, the never attainable praising. I like that begin again and again, because some days that's the work. That's what we're doing. It's not mastery or victory. We're not trying to solve everything. We're just beginning again. We're just getting up again. We begin again after disappointment or fatigue.

begin again after a bad yesterday. Maybe yesterday was just a mess. But what do we do? We get up and we begin again.

And after a bad yesterday, the odds of that whisper coming in the morning are high. That's my experience. Then he writes this. Remember, the hero lives on. Even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.

Scott Edgar (13:56.268)
I love that line because downfall is not always failure. Sometimes downfall is just what happens when somebody actually engages in life. I think the person who never risks, true, they may avoid downfalls, but they may also avoid becoming much of anything. But the one who does risk, the one who tries, who loves, builds, the one who begins again, that person will certainly fall sometimes.

But that doesn't mean that it's the end. It may become the ground of a new beginning.

So.

If life feels cold and dark right now, or if joy feels far away, if everything feels too much, you may not need to solve your whole future today. Maybe you don't need certainty today. Maybe you don't need to feel inspired today. Maybe what you need to do is just move. Just risk, just not even risk something, just move. Get your bearings, take inventory, reach out, begin again.

Maybe that's what you just need to do. Just one small step. And here's something that I've started to understand better about this idea of movement.

Scott Edgar (15:18.368)
I've come to understand movement as first aid. It interrupts the spiral. So putting on your coat, that's first aid, metaphorically speaking, putting on your coat as first aid, it interrupts the spiral, calms the nervous system. And what it does is it gives room to breathe and regain perspective. But first aid isn't the whole healing. And that's what I'm, that's what I'm trying to remember now. It takes more than just putting my coat on.

Because at some point I still have to face what's frightening me. I still have to open the letter, make the call, check the account, have the conversation. I have to begin whatever task it is that's scaring me. Because what we avoid often grows larger in the dark. And more often than not, when I face it, perspective begins to return. And I start to see things less through fear and more as they are.

Again, fear distorts reality.

Scott Edgar (16:23.576)
Because even when the problem is real, it's usually clearer and often smaller than fear had made it out to be. I've experienced that time and time again.

Scott Edgar (16:37.442)
But the other part of that, the other side of that is that if I only soothe the feelings, if I only

do enough to make the anxiety go away, but then I don't take this next step to actually address the fears, the problems rather. If I never face the reality, then that fear will return invariably.

So when heaviness arrives or when fear arrives or when that morning arrives and it whispers.

cancel all your plans. Move first. Regain perspective. Then do the thing you've been avoiding.

Scott Edgar (17:26.465)
And as I said, this is one of the deeper lessons of life that fear speaks with confidence, but it doesn't speak forever and. It always distorts reality. Feelings can be powerful and persuasive and they can shape the hour, but they don't always reveal the whole of reality, as I mentioned. Sometimes they are pain speaking, sometimes grief speaking, sometimes it's exhaustion. And often it's through movement.

through continuing, through participating, through putting on the coat, that perspective returns. We begin to see more clearly, we remember that life was larger than the feeling.

Fear shrinks. Fear shrinks me. We remember that the landscape remained evil when the darkness covered it.

In another poem, Rilke wrote this, and this is powerful. He wrote, let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

And there's wisdom in that, not because feelings are imaginary, not because suffering is not real, but because no passing feeling is the final full truth. The hard season shifts, the bright season shifts, the sorrow moves, the joy moves. And what matters is that we keep moving through them, that we don't surrender ourselves to one dark hour, and that we trust that perspective can return.

Scott Edgar (19:02.742)
So remember in those dark, heavy, cold moments to put on your coat. It won't make the cold and darkness of the morning go away.

but it will help you move through it.

Scott Edgar (19:21.998)
Appreciate your listening. This is a message that I need personally for myself. something that I think about every day. been a couple of times this week as I've been preparing for this episode that I have had the whispers and not just in morning, middle of the day and the evenings that it's whispered that everything is too much. Everything is too much.

And I've had to remind myself, Scott, you know, the answer to this. You've been working on this for the last, I've been working on this episode for a few weeks. You've been working, you know, the answer, you know, the answer. You just need to get up right now and move just last week, or I think it was Wednesday, actually. So I'm just had recorded a dry run of this episode. And afterwards I was sitting in my chair upstairs.

And just this overwhelm just descended on me. This dread of the future, just everything seemed to be coming down at once. And I just felt like I can't do this anymore. And I thought, what? I can't do this anymore. And the thought came to me, you know what to do, Scott. You know what to do. Move, just get up and move. And I did not want to move. I did not want to get off the chair.

I wanted to sit there and just suffer. But I got up. I got up. I went into the backyard.

There was cool air of the evening hit my face, walked through the tall grass. I could hear some people across the fence at a playground. I could hear them. The neighbor's dog ran over. I petted the neighbor's dog. And that pain that I felt, like the overwhelming, debilitating pain that I felt broke and dissipated.

Scott Edgar (21:28.31)
And the things that felt overwhelming still existed. They still need to be done. And there was still a discomfort that I felt. But that overwhelming pain of despair, I don't know what else word, other word to use dissipated. And I was able to breathe and I was able to see things clearly and I was able to think, okay, you can do this, God. These are solvable problems. All of them are solvable. You're going to be okay. So

This works. Moving works. It's first aid, like I mentioned. It is first aid. It's not a solution to everything. But in those moments when the world feels like it's closing in on you and you feel like there's nowhere to go, nowhere to turn to, just move. Just move. Put on the coat metaphorically. Just move.

Scott Edgar (22:29.39)
and that despair will break. That's been my experience every time.

Thank you for listening. If you found anything helpful in this episode, I would appreciate if you would share it. The whole point of my podcast here is for me to talk about things that I'm struggling with, that I'm talking about, or things that I'm learning. Not all of them. Sometimes I have people coming on just for fun light episodes.

But I want to share what I'm feeling so someone out there who may be going through a similar experience might hear it and realize, OK, I'm not alone. I'm not alone. It's no fun to feel like you're alone and you're suffering. So if something resonates with you here, I would appreciate if you would share it. Thank you for listening. I appreciate it. And always, as always in the words of E.E. Cummings, may I be I.

is the only prayer.