For a few months now, I have practiced being lost, both metaphorically and literally. I have practiced being in-between-things, I have practiced waiting for signs, I have practiced not knowing what is next. I gave up a job, I finished a book and I made space for something else to enter my life. Whatever it is, the something else has not yet arrived.

The bridge between an old life and a new life is the present. Or, as a card in my living room reminds me daily: ‘You are not lost, you are here’. In my better moments, I wonder if what I’m practicing right now might serve me in the years to come. 

For over a month now, the poem ‘We grow accustomed to the Dark’ by Emily Dickinson has been on my mind. And yes, it’s a little on the nose to write about darkness only days after one the biggest power outages in Europe’s history but here we are. In the first two stanzas, Dickinson describes a person walking home from a neighbor’s house in the pitch-black night, trying to see the road ahead. Slowly, the eyes get used to the absence of light. All good, then? Almost, Dickinson says. This is how the poem continues:

And so of larger—Darknesses—
Those Evenings of the Brain—
When not a Moon disclose a sign—
Or Star—come out—within—

The Bravest—grope a little—
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead—
But as they learn to see—

Either the Darkness alters—
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight—
And Life steps almost straight.

Walking home alone in the dark, the wanderer has space and time to contemplate larger ‘Darknesses’. Everything unsolved, unanswered and uncertain suddenly keeps her company. I have felt like that more times than I can count. But what comforts me about Dickinson’s poem is the way I can read it as an instruction manual for ‘Those Evenings of the Brain’. It’s okay to move forward when you can’t see a thing, Dickinson says. It’s okay to stretch out your hands and be clumsy. If you move, you will ‘sometimes hit a Tree’ but remember that your bruises are not mistakes; they are evidence of bravery, of having tried. As you rub your sore forehead, take comfort in knowing that you ‘learn to see’.

The Darkness of this poem is not the darkness of depression, nor the darkness of death. If anything, this Darkness has the texture of black velvet: it’s not a threat. We can be okay in its company, Dickinson says, though she puts it far more beautifully in the poem’s final line. And in one cheeky move she also reminds us that, for all our bruises and our learning and our night-time navigating, we were never in control: it is ‘Life’ stepping almost straight. All this time, as we walked through the dark, we were in relationship with a force far larger than us. Invisible, almost, to our daytime sight.