Light your way

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, “Light tomorrow with today.” This simple, beautiful quote reminds me of how every day offers possibilities to choose how to respond to life. My choices shade how my world looks and feels.

Yet, I also know how much I’m carrying into today: the stress, the pressure, the anxiety, the regret, the resentment, the mistrust, the self-doubt, the fear. The French philosopher Simone Weil would call that baggage “gravity.” If light is weightless, effortless, floating on air with beautiful warmth, gravity pulls me down to the heavy, dark, cold ground.

Weil believed we can’t resist gravity through our own effort. Pushing away our baggage gets us even more tangled up in it.

We can't pull ourselves out of our own stuff by putting new plans or task lists together, shaming ourselves, or gritting our teeth and doing it. Efforting only makes it worse.

For Weil, our most important choices are simply about where we place our attention. We notice the stress, then gently let it go.

And the pressure and anxiety.

And the regret and resentment.

And the mistrust and self-doubt.

And the fear.

In the process, she wrote, we open room for grace.

And once that space opens, we might also notice that we don’t come into the world alone, that our “light” isn’t the only light in the room. We’re strung together with other lights, other people who can illuminate our paths with and for us.

We’re not alone in the dark.