Would your life be worse then than it is right now? is a question to ask yourself when you wake up every day in fear and dread of something that hasn’t happened but might happen. Something you fight and fight and work and work to prevent happening, to you or to someone you love. Foreclosure. Suicide. Recurrence of cancer. Loss of a job, a friend, a romance.

At some point the panic might be so huge that it takes over your life, and what then? Then a balance has been achieved. The thing you so fear has, in the fearing of it, destroyed your peace, your health, your daily existence. So. If the thing you fear actually happened, would your life be worse than it is right now? 

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe something else would rush in once the anticipatory dread and panic are finally gone, something huge and unfamiliar: relief. This poem brought so many feelings flooding through me.

At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said about Trees, by Maggie Smith 

When a tree is cut down, the sky’s like 
finally, and rushes in. 

Even when you trim a tree, 
the sky fills in before the branch 

hits the ground. It colors the space blue 
because now it can.

For more information about Maggie Smith, please check out her website.

My website. My blog. My Facebook page. 

Twitter and Instagram: @alisonmcgheewriter