118: How to Stay Put

Speaker 1: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh. Ooh.

Speaker 2: Oh my God. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is. Worthiness. Empathy. Beauty. Sex positive. The borders, it can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships and its hidden costs and shadows.

Speaker 1: In a world where we other, other people, where we build walls, just tear down walls.

Speaker 2: Fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it. Hey there, my friends. I am really glad you're here. Welcome back. Before we start today, I just want to orient us a little bit. In the last episode, we talked about hope, specifically about reclaiming hope from belief, from optimism, from moral pressure. And that episode asked a question sort of like, "What is hope really when we strip it down to what survives despair?" Today's episode, it's a little bit different. This one asks, "Okay, now what? What does it actually mean to live once you stop forcing hope, once you stop trying to believe things will turn out okay, once you're no longer negotiating with reality? And how do we do that without completely falling into despair?" This episode is not about feeling better. It's about staying put. And I want to be honest upfront, this is quieter terrain.

Speaker 2: It's probably a little less inspiring. It might be a little bit more demanding, but if you found value in the last episode, this is the place that it naturally leads. So let's go there together. One of the strangest things that can happen after you let go of forced hope, and again, you need last month's episode as a precursor to this conversation. So one of the strangest things that can happen after you let go of that sort of sense of forced hope is that nothing dramatic replaces it. There's no big emotional payoff. There's no giant clarity. There's no tremendous relief. Sometimes there's just continuation. You wake up, you make coffee, you answer emails, you care about things you didn't ask to care about or that you did ask to care about. And that can feel really confusing. It's just sort of like, okay, we keep moving along in the day-to-day stuff.

Speaker 2: Because we're used to insight being rewarded with energy or motivation or momentum. But often what comes after hope isn't movement forward. It's just remaining. It's not collapse, but it's not progress either. It's just staying put. And when I say staying put, I don't mean resilience per se. I don't mean grit. I don't mean pushing through or holding on tighter or finding the lesson. I mean something much simpler and much harder. Just not turning away. Staying still. Staying put is what's left when hope no longer gives you adrenaline, and that's the conversation for today.

Speaker 2: Here's something I've noticed in myself and in a lot of people I talk to. Once we stop demanding that hope justifies itself, we tend to run straight into exhaustion. Not because hope was false, but because we've been living for so long on the promise that things could improve. And then when we stop making that promise or we realize it's not coming to fruition, the body finally tells the truth about how fucking tired it is. And that tiredness doesn't mean that the last episode didn't work, that those reorientations didn't work. It actually means that they did because when fantasy falls away, what remains is endurance. And endurance is not glamorous. It doesn't come with a narrative arc about the hero's journey. It doesn't reassure us that we're headed somewhere better. It just asks, can you remain in relationship with life as it is without demanding that it becomes something else first?

Speaker 2: And that's the work of staying put and Lord, is it a workout? So today I want to offer three practices, not for cultivating hope, but for practicing staying put. The thing that comes after hope, the thing that comes after the reorientation of hope in the last episode, staying right here. When all of you wants to squirm away or escape or quit, these are not self-improvement tools. They are ways of organizing your attention and your loyalty when nothing feels particularly promising. So the first practice is what I'm going to call choosing like a small loyalty. When everything feels really overwhelming, we tend to ask these kind of big existential global questions like, "What do I believe? What should I do? What matters?" Staying put asks much smaller questions like, "What is one thing that I refuse to abandon?" We don't ask this because it's going to fix anything or because it's going to be really strategically important or lead to some big profound realization.

Speaker 2: We ask it because it's ours. It's our truth. It's our honesty with ourself. The answer might be a person. It might be a walk you take every day. It might be a way that you commit to listening. It might be a value that you practice really quietly. It might be a creative habit or commitment. It might be a commitment to reducing harm in your community. It's something that you tend to without applause. Staying put does not require you to care about everything, but it does require you to be faithful and committed to some thing, anything. That fidelity, chosen, not imposed, is often where life keeps like reaching us, keeps touching us, even when we feel burned out. But we've got to make ourself open to that by being in a daily committed relationship with it. The second practice is letting the world remain unresolved. And this is harder than it sounds.

Speaker 2: Many of us are really tired, not just from what's happening all around us, but by the constant demand to make sense of it, to make meaning, to know where we stand, to know how it ends, to locate ourselves morally in a story that is on fire. Staying put doesn't require that kind of clarity. In fact, staying put often means letting go of the need for resolution and clarity altogether. It means letting contradictions coexist. It means letting grief remain open-ended. It means letting anger and love sit in the same room without forcing them to negotiate some kind of faux conclusion. You are allowed to live inside unanswered questions. You are allowed to keep going without knowing what it all means or what's going to happen. That's not apathy. It's restraint. It's discipline. It is the decision not to demand coherence from a world and a reality that isn't offering it.

Speaker 2: And honestly, is probably not going to in the future. The third practice is presence without rescue. This is where staying put becomes really real. Presence without rescue means being with what's here. Your own pain, someone else's pain, the state of the world, without immediately trying to fix it or justify it or transcend it. This doesn't mean you stop taking action, but it does mean you stop using action as a way to escape contact with the shit that is hard and confusing and painful and despairing. You let yourself be moved without needing that movement to take you somewhere. You let care exist without requiring it to have a payoff, and you let grief be grief. You let love be vulnerable. Staying is not passive. It is very, very, very intimate, and it's really difficult. All right. Before we go any further, I want to just slow down for a minute.

Speaker 2: And I actually want to complicate this just a bit more because I don't want to accidentally turn this notion of staying put into another virtue or this sort of moral requirement that we feel pressure toward. Staying put is not inherently good or bad. I want to be really clear about that. Sometimes staying put is love, sometimes it's care, sometimes it's courage, sometimes staying put is fear, sometimes it's habit, sometimes it's avoidance. Sometimes it's what we do because leaving would cost us more than we can bear. And I don't think it's always necessary or really even possible to sort all of that out, but I do think it matters that we kind of stay awake inside it, that we as best we can, as often as we can, we try to choose. We try to consent to what we choose as much as possible instead of being on autopilot and having the choice made for us.

Speaker 2: I know there are days when I stay and I don't actually know whether I'm doing it because I'm choosing life or because I'm afraid to choose something else. And I don't always try to resolve that. I just try to be honest about it. Say like, "I'm not totally sure." So when I talk about staying put, I'm not offering it as this moral prescription. I'm not saying that this is the right thing to do or the best thing to do. I'm saying that this is one way people remain in contact with life. And that contact can be tender or constricting or generous or messy and sometimes all of those things all at once. The work here isn't to stay at all costs. That might be one of the most important things I say in this entire episode. The work here is not to stay at all costs.

Speaker 2: The work is to notice how you're staying and whether you're present inside it. Now, there are a few things that tend to get in the way of staying put and I want to name those clearly. One is this fear that if you stop hoping for change, you're giving up or you'll wallow in depression. And I hear this a lot, but giving up fantasy is not the same thing as giving up or giving up care. Giving up fantasy is different than giving up care. Another is the fear that staying is going to make you feel smaller or more constricted or quieter or less impressive. And honestly, sometimes it does. Sometimes staying doesn't really look brave. It doesn't look sexy. It often looks pretty unremarkable and it doesn't translate well in places like social media. It doesn't give us this particularly compelling identity or sense of identity, but it does keep us in relationship with life and honest relationship with life.

Speaker 2: And I think that matters more than it sounds. The other thing I hear is that there's this fear that staying is going to hurt more than numbing out. And that's true too. Staying is tender and it's going to keep your heart open and it's not going to protect you from disappointment, but numbness also has a cost and it disconnects us not only from the pain that we're feeling and the reality of life, but sometimes also from meaning. It disconnects us from what we love, who we love. So staying put really just asks you what costs you want to pay. I'd like to say something kind of important here. I think this way of relating to the world is not for everybody and it's not for every season. Some people need belief. Some people need fire. Some people need certainty. This is not a universal prescription.

Speaker 2: It's not a judgment. It is not the better way, the right way, dot, dot, dot. If you're listening to this episode, if you're still choosing, still caring, still showing up in small or uncelebrated ways, even with or without hope is a feeling, you're already practicing staying put. And staying in my experience is one of the most honest forms of love. But again, we don't always have capacity. It's not always the right time. It's not always the right move. So to close, I guess I just want to offer a gentle invitation, not a lifelong commitment, not even a seasonal commitment, just one small commitment. This week, I'd like you to choose one thing to stay with just for the week. Not because it's going to get better if you stay with it, not because it necessarily makes sense to stay put with it, just because you're here and this is where life is.

Speaker 2: You don't have to feel hopeful, you don't have to feel inspired, though you might. You don't even have to like the world very much. Staying put is enough. So what's one thing you're committing to stay put with this week? Thank you for being here with me, my friends. I appreciate you more than I can say, and I'm cheering for you and your hearts wherever they may be in this time, place, and season. I'll see you soon. Bye for now.