Still Possible

A different way of seeing where we are

I.

The fall before my father died, I settled into his reading chair while he popped the tops off two beers. “How about a drink?” Dad would say whenever I’d visit. Actually, whenever anyone would.

A tiny pocketbook, a smidge larger than a photograph, rested open on the side table, face down. I went to nudge it when Dad handed me a Corona.

“You know, Juh,” he said as our bottles clanked, “next spring I’m going to rent a cottage at the beach. I’ll take that one, along with my other Whyte favorites, and spend a few days journaling and contemplating. Maybe some beachcombing if it’s not too rainy. A silent retreat of sorts.”

He smiled.

Dad loved literature. He loved reading even more. But my father by himself for a few days, with no one to talk to? I couldn’t see it. I wondered if it was a dormant part of Dad I never knew, or something in him that surfaced as his leukemia progressed.

Pneumonia arrived that winter. Twice. The second visit took his coastal retreat. The cancer claimed him not long after.

After the family emptied the drawers and cleaned out the closets, we turned to the bigger things. An off-white bookcase stood in the corner of the living room. At the far end of the top shelf, acting almost as a shim, was that tiny pocketbook. Running down the black spine were the words David Whyte: Still Possible. To the left, keeping it company, were The House of Belonging and The Bell and the Blackbird.

“When I’m gone, Juh,” Dad said that night, “I want you to have the Whyte treasures.”

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II.

Lately, I’ve been in a bit of a fog. If I’m honest, it’s been more than a bit, and longer than lately.

Not long ago, I awakened from restless sleep. Blinking away the crust of dreams I couldn’t remember, my eyes landed on that sinew spine, horizontal this time, resting atop its two cousins near the bottom of one of several stacks on my nightstand. Exactly where I’d set them four years ago.

Still Possible?

Right. It felt like the universe piling on. Messing with me.

So much of the life I’ve lived, and still wish to live, no longer seems possible. The joy of running, endorphins metabolizing my stress, all pinched by disk issues. The challenge of bending an approach to a tight pin behind a bunker, or simply smelling the damp, fresh cut grass that accompanied a tee time at dawn with Dad, gone now. The delight in early conversations with new clients, discovering who they are and what they carry, now belonging mostly to partners instead of me.

How am I doing? Fine.

When everything’s fine, nothing’s really fine, is it?

But the deepest part of my haze is what I keep to myself. My quick recall, my “steel trap memory,” as Mom used to call it, has given way to slow-firing synapses. Two plus two, times three, minus one, squared? The cursor behind my eyelids just blinks. Then blinks some more.

My concentration? It evaporates in minutes when it used to hold all morning. My propensity for action? Occasionally met with indecision.

Sometimes I tire by noon and am depleted by dinner.

Dinner? Where shall we go? You decide.

And still, warmth breaks through. Laughs with my daughters. Sunrises with Karen. Joy keeps reaching me in small ways.

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III.

The fact that I was there was probably a small miracle. Buried between a hundred emails, the subject line read: A weekend with David Whyte. The next line said: On the magical shores of Monterey Bay.

I arrived carrying the weight of what was no longer possible. I sat with my back against a driftwood log worn smooth by ten thousand tides.

They came in as they always do. I watched. Watched. Mesmerized.

Gathering, almost invisibly. Swelling. Rising. Cresting. Breaking. A long reach onto the shore. Then the pull back. Receding. Disappearing.

The flutter of kites overhead caught my attention before the rhythm pulled me back.

Gather. Rise. Break. Reach. Recede.

Over and over. As it has always been.

I saw waves of my own life.

Running and the races I trained for. Gathering miles months in advance, my body rising as my lungs expanded, then breaking at the sound of the starting gun, washing across the finish line utterly used up.

Mornings at the course. Gathering ourselves on the range, the first drives, the slow release of light through the trees, the laughter between shots, and settling the bets before the round faded away.

My early career, building things with others. The way something would take shape, move out into the world, and then, eventually, be over. One job becoming another, one company giving way to the next, until I gathered the courage to begin something of my own.

Then I heard the cries.

My foray into fatherhood. The difficulty of getting pregnant and the resilience to keep going. The apprehension on the morning of delivery, cresting without relief. The cries of our first-born Aly reaching the shore of me, followed moments later by those of her sister Bella. Sounds that belonged only to the four of us.

My throat caught. My chest heaved and my toes scrunched.

Another wave rose and broke. I followed it all the way in. To where it thinned and seemed to disappear.

But it didn’t.

Another rose. From the same place. The same water.

Then returned.

The races. The mornings. The cries.

I sat with that.

I brushed the sand off and packed up. I placed my journal and the pocketbook in my tote. As I walked back to my car, fog still in tow, I turned for one last look and my gaze fell on a fog bank out past the waves, resting atop the deep water.

Something inside stirred.

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IV.

I stared, then stared some more.

Nothing.

Was it possible to see nothing?

I pressed my heels into the impressions they’d formed the day before and softened my stare, fixing my eyes further out. To the other side of the foam line. On the water that was simply there. Not arriving or departing. Not performing for anyone or anything. Undemonstrative.

Then something. A gentle rhythm. A subtle rocking. Barely perceptible.

The whitecaps pulled me back and I realized that I’d spent much of my life drawn to the breaking waves. The action. The moment of impact and the recognition that came with it. The kind that fed my ego but seldom satisfied my soul.

I shifted back out and followed the quiet water past where yesterday’s fog had been to where the horizon met the bluest of skies.

What is it about fog? The way it takes our sight and asks us to stop. Rest. To listen and look not at what is on the surface, but beneath it. Into the depth.

I closed my eyes.

I felt the wind. I heard kids playing. Two dogs barked.

I dropped into the darkness and into myself.

There were Aly’s cries, along with those of Bella, still echoing as they negotiated first steps and navigated first loves. There was Dad’s companionship too, not beside me on the course, but enduring in me now as patience and reassurance offered to others.

It was all there.

Then my skin went clammy.

There were the fears that once held me. Would I finish the race or gas out midway? What if I can’t find love again? What if I don’t remarry? And would the relationships formed during my career remain after the jobs were gone?

There were the fears that still hold me. What if I’m not the father Dad was to me? Could I build a business, and then a team, that would continue caring for the hearts entrusted to us after I’m gone? And the biggest one of all: What’s next?

The two largest waves of my life — two decades of serving clients and sixteen years of raising daughters — were reaching an apex on the shore and beginning to recede.

Pulling back with time.

Tears gathered.

I kept still and kept my eyes closed.

In the quiet depth of myself, I saw that endings which once felt like disappearance were the start of new formation. Leaving home. Fatherhood. Starting the firm. Everything meaningful in my life had emerged from waters I once feared entering. What remained had always gathered again. Differently and beautifully. Inevitably. With what life would call forth.

Maybe my fog had never been about loss. Maybe it had come to slow me down long enough to hear what deeper waters were asking of me.

I blinked. Everything looked the same.

It wasn’t.

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V.

On my last morning, not long before David’s final reading, I walked a different stretch of shore. A different approach. Waves crashing against rocks. A hint of brightness in the depth.

I grinned.

I arrived hoping my fog would lift. I left trusting its presence.

Because what is always still possible, and what has always been still possible, is finding a different way of seeing where we are.

Maybe that’s what Dad saw too.

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A special thank you to David Whyte for a beautiful weekend of reflection and contemplation along the shores of Monterey Bay. I left deeply grateful.

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And finally, thank you to Tommy Dixon for your thoughtful feedback throughout the writing process. And deepest love for my wife Karen, who sat me down for a check in after reading Section II. I assured her that while I’m a bit foggy, I’m just “fine” in the right sense of the word.

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