Lifeletter #117: A Crack of Light

“Ring the bells that you can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.”

(Leonard Cohen)

This is a story about a moment of hard-won grace. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to say that grace is hard won. And sometimes it feels like grace arrives after a period of struggle or great difficulty. When we are not able to hold ourselves together. When life creates a little crack in our egoic structure, so that a bit of light gets in. That’s the real beauty of light—it doesn’t need a big opening. All it needs is a little crack.

I was teaching a course called The Heart of Communication. One of the people in this course was a man called Sean. About halfway through the course, Sean’s mother had a stroke. She was in the hospital in a city five hours away, where Sean and the whole family were going to visit her. Sean called me before they left, to tell me that he might be gone for a while.

“We have no money right now, so it will all have to go on the credit cards—a cheap hotel and the kids all day long, and the hospital. I don’t think it’s going to be very much fun,” he said.

They were gone for several weeks, returning in time for our final session. Sean arrived that evening, very present and alive. I could tell he was happy to be back. He told us a story about something that happened on one of their last days in the city.

“We were driving home from the hospital one afternoon. It had been a long, exhausting day for all of us. The kids were really tired and grumpy, and we were all desperate to get back to the motel, have dinner and crash into bed. We were downtown, right in the middle of rush hour, and the truck broke down. I couldn’t believe it. Horns were honking at us, the kids started screaming, and I couldn’t get the ignition to start. “

“I felt this huge wave of indignation and self-pity arise in me. I just wanted to have a temper tantrum and tell the universe what I thought of the way it was treating us. But something happened. I was watching the connection between my thoughts, my feelings and my body, and I heard myself asking, “Do I really want to believe this thought? What happens to me when I believe this thought? Who am I?”

“I wasn’t looking for answers,” he said, “but immediately everything shifted. I wasn’t angry, bitter and at the end of my rope any more. I dealt with the situation, and we went back and slept.” 

This was the moment, the revelation, the crack of light, not just for me, but for everyone in the room. We were all carried into that experience in the truck with Sean, knowing the kind of frustration such a scene would evoke in us. Nobody spoke. There was just silence in the room, all of us looking at Sean in wonder.

“How did you do that?” I finally asked. “Where did you find the power to stop and inquire, in a moment like that one?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I really don’t know. It just felt like something else was called for.”

These are the moments we are waiting for. They arrive unexpected and unheralded, like the moment when Rosa Parks was asked to go and sit at the back of the bus, and she said “No,” because something else was called for.

Something cracked open in her that day. It wasn’t a perfect offering, her ‘No.’ It was simply what emerged when something new touched her consciousness. She realized that something else was possible, and she moved with that.

I hear about these moments a lot, in my work with couples. When the energy of a habitual reaction is taking over the whole body and mind, and then, somehow, the person realizes that something else is called for. A little drop of light falls through the crack in the armour. Such a small moment, and what is seen can be so vast.

That’s all it takes. And we never know when it will happen. When love will break through, when tenderness will open its arms.

with love

Shayla