dear hilary: the love equation

Dear Hilary,I have another question for you. This year, boys have been a huge distraction.When I decided I like a boy, it begins to consume my thoughts and actions. I change the direction I walk to class just to "accidentally" run into them, I scheme ways to end up in situations with them, I make sure to get to math class early just so I can find a seat beside them. I do irrational things all the time. Maybe it's infatuation or lust, but then why does it feel so real then? It just seems impossible to shake this frame of mind. I want to stop obsessing, but at the same time I like obsessing. Is any of this natural? Is it unhealthy? Or maybe it goes deeper, and I am just desperate to be loved and treasured. Even so, my heart is aching from these boys- this is something that seems so silly but has such a legitimate weight on my heart.Love,A little obsessedDear A little obsessed,You know what I can't stand, really, truly, cross my heart shoot me ten times before you make me ... ? Settlers of Catan type games. I'm terrible at them. I lack all the strategy. And that makes me mad. And then I do something stupid, I don't want to admit it, or I do, and I basically just end up feeling pissy. Not a fun time. I like cards, I like charades, I like 20 questions that I turn into 20,000 questions, I like Mafia and a thousand other ones. But make me settle villages and stuff, and I'm sunk.So last year this boy that I really liked brought me to a friend's house on the water, and a funny group of us - maybe five or six people - sit down to play ... yep, you guessed it, one of those bridge-building farm settling monasteries and something about blocking other people's castles games. I wasn't jazzed about it, but I played the whole game.And not because that's the polite thing to do, though my mother did raise me to be polite. I did it to impress the boy. I did it to keep his attention. I did it with some well-timed doe-eyed looks in his direction, a wink or two. I can only imagine if I could see myself I would laugh - here I am, making faces at the game in my head, and then whenever he makes eye contact, holding on for dear life to those brown eyes and hoping he'd look just a bit longer.In the love equation in my head, playing this game + batting my eyelashes + walking by his office by the mailroom in my work outfit + some well placed comments about German philosophy + drinking a second cider at the bar on a Thursday night x my hope squared = LOVE.I think most of us do this, just as you describe your own love equation to me - if you sit here in math class + walk past them and if you use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate just where they might get coffee after school that day... maybe that's how you get them to see you. Maybe that will = LOVE.I want to separate out how real your feelings are from whether your changing seats in math class or walking in a different direction has a tangible effect on a relationship. Your feelings are real; you are attracted and interested, and honestly I'm going to hazard a guess that some of it is infatuation, some of it is exploration, some of it is longing, some of it is that delightful butterfly feeling when you recognize how wonderful and lovely someone is, and there is a whole lot more feeling that can be easily categorized. That will all be real no matter what you do or don't do on a given day of the week or a given Saturday night game night.And yes, honey, I think some of it is maybe a little bit much. I liked the feeling of liking someone so much I wound up playing games I didn't like and changing how I walked and what I wore and what I talked about (though I love German philosophy). When the excitement of adventuring into romantic feelings becomes the trump card in your (even small) decisions, I think it's good to take a step back. Changing your behavior won't make anyone like you more or notice you more - it won't satisfy those longings to be treasured and appreciated and loved, it won't do much of anything. Remember Sugar - real love moves freely in both directions. Love moves freely. It moves when not constrained by constantly monitoring behavior, input and output, looking for an equation that will finally work. It moves when your longing to be more of who you are meant to be, your longing to lean into the true and beautiful and good of your life, equations abandoned, is where all your energy is going.Resist the temptation to take my words and make them another voice in your head that calculates the way towards those boys or that kind of love, dear one. You can't force contentment and the growing wings as a way to get those boys to notice you. You can't ask your heart to long for the good/true/beautiful so that the boy in math class sees you - that's no different from calculating which seat.Instead open up your hands and heart and start asking the question - what are those lupine seeds I'm going to scatter today (thanks, Miss Rumphius)? How can I do one more thing to make this world a little more beautiful? Who are the people right here, right next to me? How do I make their world a little more beautiful?  We don't have to play Settlers of Catan. We don't have to change seats. Real love is on the move already. You and me, together, we can just open towards it.Love,hilary

dear hilary: you are held

Dear Hilary,

I finished high school today. And on one hand, I'm relieved to get my life back and start my summer and move on to whatever God has in story for me, but on the other...I just can't believe it's actually OVER. And there's still so many questions, so little closure with the people I've grown to love. One minute I was part of their lives, and now I'm not, with little or no time to say goodbye. What's going to happen to them? And why can't I be there to see it?

Love, Wanting More Time

Dear Wanting More Time,

I had this flash of an image of you when I read your letter in my inbox last week. I could see you, hands open, a crowd of people in one, all shouting and laughing and crying and jumping on top of each other the way people do at graduations, and in your other hand, the summer, the next things, which look mostly like a huge blanket of fog overflowing between your fingers. There you were, in my mind, holding these two unruly things, this tangle of people and this bank of fog, and you are trying to hold them out in front of you.It strikes me that you cannot hold onto either of them.The people are a wonder, aren't they? I remember at graduation last year this moment with some of my fellow graduates, after we'd marched in and out, taking this picture where we tried to jump in the air at the same time. The picture came out with us all in various stages of contortion, mid-air or landing on the ground with a thump. But the expression on our faces is the same - some kind of uncontrollable delight. Delight in one another. In the day. In the selves we didn't even know yet we would become in the next year. I have that picture in my office, all of us laughing and delighting together. About January of this year, I looked at it in the middle of typing notes for a project, and felt my throat tighten, my eyes begin to tremble, tears just peeking out from beneath my eyelids. I don't see those people every day anymore. I don't even know what all of them are doing, where they ended up, if they got into that grad school or took that job or moved across the country or the world. I couldn't hold them. Not in the snapshot from last May. Not in my hands in the quiet nights before we all grew up and outward. I tried to, I really did. Looking at that picture in January was a reminder of how much I had longed to hold on tight and build deep, everlasting bridges, and invite everyone to live on the porch of my heart forever with glasses of lemonade and sweet tea. But the thing about rising, dear one, is that we must keep rising. That's Sugar. We have to keep going, out past the point of holding onto each other just as we are. Out past the knowledge of what we all do and what we all dream and who we love and when and why. We have to journey into the fog you're weighing in your other hand.I'm a big fan of this idea of rising, of journeying onward, even into the fog that seems to murky and dark. Mine has been, this first year out of college - but it teaches you to walk on your knees, to crawl, slow and steady, to learn the feel of decisions and love and the path in front of you, brick by brick and bird by bird. I think that's where you and the wondrous people you love begin. Together. You get on your hands and knees. Release yourself and release your friends from the idea that you can hold this life: be held by it, instead.You'll find the fog not so terrifying when you're a bit lower to the ground. You'll feel the path with your fingers, and you'll find that there are hearts and hands searching next to yours. These will become your community, will journey with you, for a time, for a lifetime, for something in between. They may not always be the people you have loved and lived next to until now; likely, some will depart for different journeys, paths branching out again and again, and you, though you love them, will have a path branching a different way. You ask me for an explanation about why you can't see it, but there isn't one of the kind you want. I'd give you an answer if I had one, but I suspect that what you want more than that answer is a way forward.So: though it is murky, though it is some days dark and damp, though it is not clear, you are held by this life. So are those wondrous people. No more holding on now, dear one. It's time to begin.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the other side of the door

Dear Hilary,I have a question. And it is this: how do you know when it's time to move on? To give up? I said I wasn't like anyone else. That I wasn't going anywhere. And I don't want to. What if the deep quiet love with a wild and crazy illogical side is the true love. I'm sure I could meet someone new some day and fall in love with them, have a passionate romance, what have you. But what if this is my only chance for that deep true sitting quietly by your side not saying a word just being there love? What if he is the person i could spend the rest of my life with, just like he was terrified of? How do I know whether to let go because clearly he isn't ready to admit anything yet? If he even actually feels the same at all? and because i don't need this back and forth pushing me away and pulling me back nonsense? Or whether to just be patient and hold on, because the wild quiet love is worth waiting for?Sincerely,Steadfast and confused.Dear Steadfast,I pondered your letter the whole time I was away, driving along the autobahn or standing in museums looking at bits of five hundred year old German script or taking pictures in front of statues of Martin Luther outside churches. I pondered while I ate cake and drank black coffee - what do I possibly say? Your letter asks the question I answer two ways and then ten and then back to one, and then wrap myself in a knot trying to sort out. I don't have a clean answer; I can only tell you a bit about what other, wiser people have told me, and tell you a bit of a story, and hope that spreads a little glow on your path as you go.Not too long ago, there was a guy - I'll call him Mr. W - that I was firmly, steadfastly convinced that I would be in a romantic relationship with. We hadn't had one up to that point, but we had the glimmering possibility of one. We had long conversations about what felt like everything on the planet, we liked a lot of the same books, we liked ideas, we liked to sit in bars over wine or gin and argue. There was chemistry, no doubt about it, and there were sparks flying, and I was sure that this was the love you talk about: wild and quiet and passionate and steadfast all at once.But. That little word, every so often, would pop up - in conversations about Mr. W with my friends, or with myself. But. There was the irreproachable fact that we weren't in the relationship I saw a glimmering possibility for. We weren't together on the couch after a long day of work. We weren't writing the letters, making the picnics, holding hands, telling our friends. I knew that possibility was there; but it hadn't been made true.So, Steadfast, I asked, point-blank, not in pretty words but in true ones. I put on makeup and thought about what I'd wear and ate half a grilled cheese in my brother's truck beforehand because I was so nervous. And the answer was no.Before the story gets too long-winded, I want to bring you with me, if you will, to an afternoon just before I asked Mr. W for the last time about the glimmering possibility of us. I am sitting on a couch in a brightly lit office, and my counselor, wise woman that she is, asks me how I feel about the prospect of having this confrontation. The words, awful, terrible, please don't make me do this please please please come to mind. But there, clanging like an iron bell (thank you, Sugar), are the words I speak:"The truth has already arrived, though, hasn't it? I'm just going to open the door for it now."She looks at me in surprise, and I mirror the same expression back to her. Yes, she says, smiling. Yes.Steadfast, I think the truth has arrived. I think you know this, from the letter you sent me, and I think you are now peeking at it from behind the door of your heart, and you have to decide if you open the door. Opening the door to the truth won't mean you get special knowledge of what the future holds. But from everything you tell me, this guy, he is saying no, and that's the truth standing at your door. The other things you know about him or his life situation, they aren't knocking. They aren't here. When all has been laid out on the table before you, and the answer is no, then no is knocking at your door.My counselor told me over and over in the year before I opened the door that it takes the time it takes. No more and no less. So I'll echo that to you, too. It takes the time it takes. You are allowed to be steadfast and confused before you open the door and walk outside and meet this guy's answer and grapple with what it offers you and what it denies.But eventually, I think, that's where you must go. You must open the door. You must look that answer in the eyes and listen to it, and let it ache, and let it roam around, and let it lead you. Because the truth will always lead you somewhere. His no will journey you to a new place. Mr. W's no took me somewhere completely unexpected. The truth does that.And here is the other thing, for your fear (and my fear) about whether there will ever be any love like the one you express in your letter - the truth also always leads towards fullness. The guy in your letter, he doesn't sound like he leads there. His no will not bring an end to the fullest love that you can imagine - it will bring only an end to one possibility, glimmering and beautiful though it was.There is fullness and joy on the other side of the door. I promise this. And in the acceptable time, I have all kinds of confidence you'll fling that door open.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the thinnest envelope

Dear Hilary,I've been telling people for a good while now that I have plans for graduate school. You see, I've always had plans for graduate school. Once it was law school and once it was nursing and a few times it's been a joint JD/PhD and always it's been the idea that I should and can be a part of that. But lately, when I tell people, I tell them the school, the fellowship, the hope, and then I start to worry. Because what if I don't get in? What if I get that thin envelope in the mailbox? What if I'm not one of the few who get chosen to be a part of the class of... ? What will they all think? What will I do?Love,NervousDear Nervous,What will you do? I'll just ask the question back at you. It isn't for anyone else to work out or reason how you build a life after that gnawing possibility of rejection. We can give you the pep talks, pass the B&J, or the g&t, or both, tell you to stop worrying and stop feeling that prick of fear, because you have a beautiful life... but this one belongs to you and there isn't all that much I can tell you. You, however. You can tell you a lot.You can tell yourself that the meaning of the thinnest envelope is less than the meaning of the love you've sincerely built in the afternoons and the extra hours and the holding your palms open for another heart. You can tell yourself that if graduate school A or B  says no, it means less about who you are than the six pairs of eyes that gaze up at you during the busiest time at the prayer circle, mean less than the three year old who thanks God for you, right there in her list of horses and birthday parties.You can approach the mirror with an open hand and whisper that you are going to hold it open and watch what is put inside it, without peering sideways at what is put in the palms of the other hands that grace your life. You can imagine yourself a seed, in a fallow field, hungry for the rain, but unafraid.You can whisper a bit of peace, say Sarah Bessey's, "calm your heart" while you drive home. You can remember that not one of us came into the world stamped with a seal of graduate school approval and all of us came in with God's image borne deep in our bones and His law written on our hearts and He is right there, engraving His name over the walls of our hearts.You can pour the second glass of red wine. You can write yourself a letter and put it in the thinnest envelope and mail it to yourself for the same day that those other envelopes, thick or thin, arrive next year. You can write love inside that letter: love for the work that has belonged to you, love for the work that is mysterious and yet to come, love for the people, love for the places, always more love than you were able to bear but you somehow did, anyway.That's all you.What people think if you don't get in is a deep fear that lurks under the bed. Will they love me, if I'm not a ? we whisper. If I never have a - if I fail to win - if I don't - ? And this is what will catch us slowly, the sinking feeling that perhaps what they love is only how well we've performed.You work your way out by rereading the old and good and true words. You run back to the promises that we have been set free, and He who loves, He is from everlasting. His command to abide in his love. His promise to send His Spirit to be with us.You are loved abundantly, dear one. Not because of an envelope or a graduate school or an anything. Love is just like that: overwhelming and rich and somehow, always, seeking us. Let it find you.Love,hilary

dear hilary: pull up a chair

Dear Hilary,I'm not a loud person. I don't write op-eds or shout my thoughts during class. I don't feel like I fit - I'm afraid to say something because, I might be wrong. But I admire people who give their opinion. Who have thoughts and opinions on things like infant baptism and an ideology that lines up with Hegel or Gadamer or St. Thomas Aquinas. But I don't have something neat and I'm not confident my opinions are right. Where is there a table for me?Sincerely,Too QuietDear Quiet,When I lived on Capitol Hill I went to a Baptist church on Sunday mornings. It was a ten minute walk, easy to get to, and every Sunday they served free lunch to the starving intern and college student populations that flock to the city in search of a place at a table. They would pile lasagnas or pieces of chicken or ham sandwiches, and once I think I saw pizzas, their white boxes stacked unevenly in the serving window. At those lunches there was a table of excited students - some from my program, some from schools in the city, a few post-college interns - always talking and laughing, gesticulating wildly with whatever was on their fork. I would creep down the hall towards the room after standing too long by myself in the "book sale" section of the church next to books about the loneliness of single life and searching in vain for the remarkably good looking man who had once talked to me as we both walked out of the metro at Union Station.But I never sat at the table. I couldn't bring myself to eat more than a piece of celery once, standing in the back, and I think my roommate once insisted that we at least eat some bread and spaghetti. I still hovered anywhere but that table of smiling, confident people talking loudly about their view of resurrection and grace and the "political game." I assumed that their table was for the people who knew where they stood and who they were. Who had it sorted out. Who had opinions. Who didn't stand too long next to books on singleness waiting for the mystery man from the metro.I wish I had asked your question out loud, by sitting down next to one of them.The thing about tables is that they're these places of invitation and acceptance, a give and take between each person there, across the plastic blue tablecloth or the fine linen, three chairs apart or bumping elbows. The table in the Baptist church might not have seen or recognized me - but I don't think I made myself all that visible. It felt at the time that I wasn't qualified, wasn't a part of the crowd, but I think the harder, quieter truth is that I wasn't really listening for their invitation. And I didn't trust that there was something I was going to offer simply by my presence, elbow against elbow, passing the extra napkins or the brownies or the salt.Where is there a table for you? You are needed and welcomed in surprising places.You can't be everywhere, sweet pea, and perhaps you cannot have dinner at every table you encounter. But you can, when you come across people who make you think, who you admire, who cherish good words and ideas - you can pull up a chair.It will not always work. I'm scared to give you this advice because there are moments when the grace runs dry and the harshness runs wild, and you aren't invited to draw nearer. I'm sorry in advance for those moments.But I am on the side of trusting that you bringing yourself, even without your loud and confident opinions is something wondrous. I am on the side of thinking it is worth it to pull up the chair, to believe you have something to bring with you, because you are.I am on the side of believing that tables are the beginnings of the truly beautiful between people.There is a table, many, in fact, for you in this world. Somewhere, there is a beautiful waiting to begin.Love,hilary

dear hilary: why we pray

Dear Hilary,If God is other, if God is something inconceivable and beyond, why would we pray? Why should we pray? How do we even know if he hears or cares, if there is anything real about the Person you say you get on your knees in front of? I don't want to pray anymore. And why should I?Love,The ChallengerDear The Challenger,I'm torn between telling you that I believe in intercession, in prayer, in the agonizing work of getting on our knees because of something about St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, and this one man who lives in rural Mississippi who I met last year on a trip down to see my mentor - and telling you that I'm not sure I always do believe it, but I pray anyway. Both are honest, in different hours of the same day, in different seasons of the same year. And the reasons behind our prayers are mysterious, I think, and somehow beyond words, but I'll try.I pray because of things like, well, the fact that God's otherness has been brought so near to us in the image of God we bear, in how the Incarnation has flung all our ideas of "cosmic distance" out the window. I haven't ever known what to say to the red shift and the rate of expansion of galaxies, other than to ask whether the Incarnation shouldn't shatter any idea that we have about what love is, and what it contains?And when I get on my knees in my office and bend my head and close my eyes against the too-bright office light, I'm not sure I know how to believe Him against the black holes, the waves and vibrations of shadows and shuddering dimensions, the unknowns. And call me a fool, but I remember a love so particular He knows my name, cares where I work, who I befriend... a love so particular, He came to earth to save me. God is inconceivable; but it's His movement that mystifies me more than His being. The fact of them: the fact of this Redeeming, the fact of this messy, sweaty, bloodied birth and life and death; the fact of his loving, not just in the hypothetical, but in the lived. I can say, "I pray because God has commanded me to," and there is something in that all on its own.I pray because God Himself cut the covenant. God saved Israel. God wandered with His people, through the years of disobedience and the agony of distance and all in the movement towards this pivotal mystery: the Word made Flesh.And whether we want to, or not, doesn't really seem the question you're asking. I think if you waited a little longer, you might ask that question differently. I think you'd be asking whether you can trust the work of prayer. Whether it means something.And that answer is a terrifying yes.You can trust the work of prayer, of speaking words too big for your head and your heart, of interceding for a person you love.I can't pretend to really know why. My logical and theological arguments begin to fade at the moment when I face the real question - can we trust this - and I don't know how to tell you yes. But yes.God is inconceivable, beyond comprehension, the creator of the dimensions we know nothing about. And He is wondrously close to us. And His love is particular for you and me. And a love that particular is listening.Love,hilary

dear hilary: gather the threads

Dear Hilary,All I ever see is the clock ticking. Time is always running out. There's never enough time to do it all. When this season ends, a new one will begin but what about when that one comes to an end? Why do all good and beautiful things come to an end? I'm so scared on missing out on things and losing those who are precious to me.Hilary, how do I live alive in the moment when all I can think about is how quickly the end is approaching? How do I deal with the clock that keeps ticking, and a heart that desires to live so fully, experience so much, and spend time with so many people? My heart feels ready to explode.Love,About-to-GraduateDear About to Graduate,Why do all good and beautiful things come to an end? I feel you on the edge of your seat with this question, maybe tapping a pencil on your desk, wondering, worried that the answer might be something trite like, "because that's the way things go," or "that's life," or even, "it will all be okay." I want to steer clear of those words, not because they are untrue (actually, I think they're terribly true), but because sometimes it helps to hear it sounding in different words. I want to tell you a story.I was sitting in a kayak in the middle of a French river. My friend and I were in floppy sunhats, my skin already a solid pink, our arm muscles so tired we couldn't even admit to ourselves that we didn't really know how to "feather" or "J-stroke" back to the group. It was early afternoon, just after lunch, and the group was eagerly paddling ahead while we floundered. It was summer, and in the south of France there is a sweetness to the air itself, a dull humming from all the things coming alive: lavender and bees and olives. We were in search of the Pont du Gard somewhere down the river, further into the afternoon. We were in search of ourselves, as soon-to-be seniors, in search of love at 17, in search of everything. I can almost taste that day, our laughter pealing out over the water to annoy a stray duck and a solo Frenchman, convinced that we had arrived at the beginning and this was, and must be, a kind of forever. We floated under the ancient Roman aqueduct singing a madrigal we had learned four years before - "All Ye Who Music," All ye who music love, and would its pleasures prove, O come to us, who cease not daily to warble gaily...As the days in France, and later that summer, meandered by me, I began to panic. It was senior year, I whispered, the end of high school. The end of the daily relationships, the walks to and from the Barn, the end of singing "Wade in the Water" and "I'll Fly Away" in voice lessons, the end of whispers and note passing and French. I stayed busy so I wouldn't see the end coming. I convinced myself it would be fine. Or that I wouldn't miss things. Or that time wasn't really moving at all.But, dear heart, time was moving. And I moved with it. And you, where you are, have moved with it too. We cannot hide in our feathers or in our schedules. We cannot convince ourselves that absence is a word without meaning or the life, so rich in front of us, is not going to change. We are not given permission to do that.I want to tell you that my story in France, which I type as if I am still in the kayak in the south of France, it was six years ago. All of its richness has entered the wider tapestry of my story and now, when I plucked the thread to show you, it brings with it a thousand others. Stories I didn't know about until four years ago, one year ago, Sunday afternoon. It's bound to the things that haven't happened yet in my life - just as your threads from high school, the people you love, the things you love, all that feels most alive in you - they are bound to your future. I promise you do not lose the things you love, and the good and beautiful things that go through the first ending now have a life beyond it.Gather the threads, sweet pea. Run your fingers through these stories of high school, of deep friendship, of strange awkward school dances and movies you didn't need to spend the money to see in theaters and essays and languages and family summers. Hold them in your hands, feel their weight and length. Write them down, or tell them on the phone late at night. Or relive them with your dearest friends.They have a life beyond this first ending.They live among the thousand threads of your one beautiful story.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the leap

Dear Hilary,I have loved the same boy for most of my life. We've been dating now for two months, and he's crazy about me and I can tell, but he's reluctant to get more serious in case there's somebody else who is "The One" for me down the road. I don't think there will be, but I don't know how to tell him so he'll believe me. I think this might be a forever kind of love. But when do we know for sure? When does it just become time to take the leap?Love,Cliff-DwellerDear Cliff-Dweller,When I was 17, the movie Enchanted came to the big screen. A sweet movie, one that cleverly and wonderfully plays with other Disney stories, a redheaded heroine, the city of New York... I loved it.At the very end of the movie Carrie Underwood sings this song, "Ever After." I used to imagine (I'll admit it, because this is a place to be real) that I was Carrie Underwood singing that song. I used to imagine that "The One" would sweep into my life and play opposite me in a slightly-more-but-not-that-much-more-realistic version of Enchanted. Haven't we all done that, somehow? We wait for the sign. We wait for the marvelous, the extravagant, the moment when there is nothing for it but to burst into song in the middle of a crowded street and hand out roses. We all want a One, and we all want to know for sure. We think that finding "the one" will give us the permission to be extravagant with our love. To proclaim and sing it, Carrie-style.But I wonder if we, in our waiting for the big sign, we end up more afraid than we should be. What if that wasn't the sign? we ask ourselves driving along country roads. Or what if there is someone else, in a different state/country/zip code, in a different college, with a different life story... we write in our journals. I wonder if he or she is really everything I think I want. I wonder if I should be as committed to this as I want to be... I wonder, I wonder. We could wonder ourselves to death waiting for someone to come in with a pot and a wooden spoon, clanging away, "The one is approximately 2.4 miles and 3 months away!"If you want to know anything, you have to leap.You've entrusted a big thing to me - this question about love - and I don't take it lightly. I don't think we are meant to be thoughtless or hasty before we leap. I don't want to tell you or your boyfriend to do that. Ask each other hard questions. Ponder together what this thing is between you, and what you think it might or could become. Fight, and laugh, and even spend some time worry and pleading and joking and explaining and listening... and a million verbs.All the million verbs point to the bigger point, though: live it. That's what the leap is about. You won't know before you go whether this is "the one." You won't know what kind of gift you are to each other. You won't know if it is a forever kind of love. I can't promise you that.But I can promise you that when it comes to love, the only learning is in living. I can promise you that if you leap, whether you are a forever love or a season of love, whatever the nature and shape of your story, it will be lived. We can wonder alone in a dark room with the "Enchanted" soundtrack playing, asking for the sign that will make us sure that we are right about who this person is and what they are meant to be. And I think there is a special kind of love I have for those days, in all of our stories.But I wish the fullness of leaping for the two of you. I wish the hearts that you'll help expand in each other. I wish the bigger story, the one of unknowns and discoveries and all those million lived verbs.There is a glorious kind of life in the leap together - wherever you land.Love,hilary

to the girls in my college classrooms

Dear girls who walk along the pathways and hallways at my college,Dear women who fill these walls and ceilings with your ideas and questions,Dear hearts that are so full they feel like bursting,I see you. Right where you are. I catch these glimpses of you on my way to and from the student dining hall. I see you scrunched over papers. I see you holding back tears in tight-lipped smiles to the many people who you pass on your way to chemistry. I see you stray a glance in my direction, see me in all my appearing-put-together-as-a-young-professional, and sigh a little in your shoulders. I see you blink and brush past your day, all worried, always worried that there isn't enough of you, enough of time, enough of effort or fullness or beauty.Right where you are? It's all kinds of hard. Before you tell me that if you only worked harder, if you only sucked it up more, if you only tried to be more cheerful, more in shape, less complaining. Before you tell me you need to get into the Word more, spend more quiet time or homework time or something else, or something else...Before that - it is hard.The hard that it is cannot be measured or calculated, cannot be judged, cannot be lined up next to everyone else and compared. It is all its own, it is aching, and it is raw, and it is real. And some days you forget that it is hard; and some days everything you do is a reminder.If I can tell you anything, as the girl you think is put together, as the person you're not sure even knows what you're talking about -oh love, I just want to wrap you up in a little extra love for yourself today. I want to tell you that the answer is not in trying harder to be better or to be perfect or to fit into the space you worry you don't fit into.The answer isn't in more activities or more to-do lists, more reprimands for yourself, more scolding. The answer isn't in staying up later to finish that paper or study as hard as you think you should study for that test.Can I just give you a hug? Because you, right where you are, right in the middle of the hard, you are wildly lovely and to be cherished. Someone told me the other day that I am intimidating, because it always seems like I have it together. So here are a few confessions, from me, the girl who wants you to believe that she is perfect and the girl who knows she isn't, the girl who deeper down than her perfect, wants you to know she is real:I cry in my office at work when I realize there is a typo in something I just handed in.Some days I drive into work thinking about all the mean things I want to say to people.Sometimes I lie in bed watching Castle or Hart of Dixie instead of reading books that would make me intellectually sophisticated, because I really just want to lie in bed watching TV.I cry in my car after a long run. I avoid mirrors because of the way I'm convinced my stomach looks. I'd rather eat a cupcake and a cheeseburger than a salad. I have gotten into trouble with boys, trouble without boys, trouble about boys. I've done stupid. I've done selfish. More than I admit.I get mad at God. I don't spend all that much time in the Word. I went to church last week and cried the whole way through and didn't sing the hymns and went home and moped around.I haven't got it all together. I'm a mess sitting here writing this to you, but when I see you on campus, with your brightness and your beautiful heart and the way you listen and the way you love, I have to write to you. I have to tell you, dear hearts, that it is okay to be in the hard. It's okay not to know where to go from here.I even think it's okay to sit down right in the middle of it, and whisper, "I have been spent."I'll come sit next to you and give you a hug. And in the middle of it all, where we sit, I think God will come sit down with us. Because He wants to be with the real us. Because He loves the real.Love,hilary 

dear hilary: be braver

Dear Hilary,I just watched the Brené Brown video - the one about being vulnerable, people who live wholeheartedly? Do you know that one? Her Ted Talk? I want to know how you have learned about doing that in your life so far? How do you live vulnerably?Love,Un-vulnerable in SeattleDear Un-vulnerable,I've watched that video a bunch of times in the last few months. It was a suggestion from my counselor, and, like most of her suggestions, it was a good one. When I first saw it, I was sitting in my office at work and worrying about something (I'm a bit of a worrier, I'll confess). I was eating these really good cookie things I got in the grocery store, 2 boxes for $5, and they promised to be very nutritious and give me hours and hours of energy as well as fill me with the sweet taste of hydrogenated blueberry (I promise, actually, they're really good). As I munched, I worried, and Brené talked, and I thought about vulnerability and shame and courage and those words I'm so fond of and so very not good at living by.This year, the year of 22? I have learned that I am braver than I thought I was. I have also learned that being brave is more about being braver - about the growing from one kind of brave to another, far more than it is about the thing itself.I want to start with being braver than I thought I was. I go on runs sometimes - you probably know this from my blog - and when I run, I talk. I talk to God, I talk to the birds, I talk even a little bit to myself. And the things I say are brave not because they are difficult, but because they are gracious. "I love my body," I said one summer afternoon. "I have done a good job at work this week," I said as I rounded the muddy right turn in the path behind the college buildings, the one that leads to my favorite pond. "God, Your goodness is bigger than my idea of it," was the thought last week as I ran hands up through a cul-de-sac praying for a sign from Him. These things are brave: because they are words of love instead of judgment, words of a recovering good girl who now believes that her job is not to hurl condemnation at her legs or her work ethic or her relationship with God, but instead to say things in love. That's brave.Brave looks like wearing bright blue pants on a Friday night, like eating Ben & Jerry's from the carton, like whispering to your best friend that you do not know if you can believe that you are worthy. Yes, un-vulnerable, brave is in the work of admitting all the places where you ache. This year, my year of 22, I have learned that to be brave is to walk into a room and, for just a moment, believe that all things work together for the good.And then that oh-s0-much-more-important thing: in this, my 22nd year, I learned that it is not about achieving a level of brave all for its own sake. It's not about an arbitrary measurement, where you suddenly are brave enough, where you have arrived at a satisfactory level... Oh no. Being brave is for something else: for love, for the truth, for the sake of the bigger, richer life that you must seek. You must not seek it for merely self-actualization: you must seek it because to be alive is a great and grave privilege. But being brave is more about being brave in the direction of the other things you seek. Therefore, it is a movement, a blossoming. One day you manage to say to your abs that you love them. One day you pray and release. One day, in the middle of the day, you watch the Ted Talk again and you say to yourself, I want to live wholeheartedly, too. And that is brave. And that is braver.Living vulnerably is not a thing to be achieved, my dear friend. It is more a striving to live according to the great privilege it is to be alive, a striving to offer your fullest self because you believe that self is so radiant, so very real, that to offer less is to be less. It is a striving, a blossoming, a becoming.In this, my 22nd year, I am beginning to strive. I am beginning to hope that I will be braver now than I was three years ago and braver in twenty years than I am in ten years, and all the while, seeking not merely bravery or courage or vulnerability: seeking instead the good, wondrous life.That's what I know about being vulnerable, Un-vulnerable: yours is a good and wondrous life. Be brave in its direction.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the bass notes

Dear Hilary,I know that my life is littered with problems only a privileged few could complain about. I know that I'm not really complaining about what is worth complaining - and I tell myself as I peel the parsnips and chop onions for some vegetarian thing I am convinced I should eat because it would be good for me, that I shouldn't be feeling so confused and lonely and irritated as I do. But I want to know - I'm hungry to know - what is the point of the sadness? Is it okay to feel sad, even if there isn't a good reason?Love,Peeling the parsnipsDear Peeling,Hey there, hon. Before we go any further down this road, I need to tell you first just a yes. A yes as you chop and peel and worry and scream to loud or soft music or kiss random strangers in a subway car or wish you were kissing them or eat vegetarian or Five Guys burgers. Yes. It is okay to feel what you feel.Permission is not a thing we should seek for our emotions. That's a lie that we've been taught - that we need to ask first before we allow our hearts to keel over with the things they're already carrying. They are what they carry; permission is irrelevant. So you, rich in love or money or college degrees, poor in clarity or money or college degrees, mixed up between them all, you must give yourself more breathing room. Chuck permission - the question of "is it okay to feel..." right out the window.Let's start where you are: you feel sad.You peel the parsnips - a beautiful sounding phrase, love - and you are lonely. And it simply does not matter one bit if I tell you that I am peeling potatoes, another person is chopping lettuce, and three other people are eating ice cream straight from the carton - and that we are all, in our own ways, feeling the pull and dip and gravity of sadness. That we, too, wonder about what is ahead, or what we have just emerged from, or what we are sitting in right now. When you feel loneliness, I do not think that you can comfort yourself out of it. No amount of "solidarity!" or "we're in it with you!" or "buck up it's not that bad!" will help.What will help is to keep peeling the parsnips.What will help is to ask your lonely, your confusion, your unidentified emotions, to pull up a chair as you work. Don't ask them to say everything - just allow them to accompany you in the midst of your daily life. Invite them to sit with you in a coffee shop or gaze at a sunset on your drive home. Ask them to play Switchfoot's "Where I Belong" on repeat. Wander up and down the grocery store aisles with them. They are not against you.They are, instead, the bass notes. In good music, we listen first for the melody - for the soaring notes, for the lingering treble. We pick out the main theme and wait for it as it darts between other notes. We think of the song, and we hum that line.But in most music, love, there are the bass notes. These are sometimes sweet and soft, sometimes insistent, sometimes fiery, sometimes desperate, sometimes lonely. The bass notes hold the melody. They deepen it and give it a new shape.I think that this is what your sadness, the things that you complain about but wish you didn't - is, at its root. It is the bass line of your song. It is deepening work, these nights of peeling parsnips and sitting with loneliness. It makes your melody a fuller story, in a way that nothing else could.That is the miracle of the bass notes: though they go often unnoticed, they do remarkable things. So I urge you - wherever your days take you, remind yourself: some days I will sing the bass notes. Some days I will build the song of my life in the deep and difficult things. Peel the parsnips, and love the bass notes.The song could not be so good without them. Love,hilary

dear hilary: this is called delight

Dear Hilary,So I'm reading the chapter "Artists, Mystics, and Clowns" in Brennan Manning's Ruthless Trust and wondering: why do we act the way that we do, and how does this reflect God? What's so great about efficiency? Gravitas? Breast-beating? Sobriety? Somewhere along the line I leaned that these were more holy than extravagance, art, and levity. Somewhere alone the line I learned I must stifle effulgent passions, had no time for interruptions, mustn't laugh when there's so much suffering in the world and so much work to be done, must put away childish playfulness. Somewhere along the line I learned that God is begrudging and exasperated. What is God's disposition, anyways?Sincerely,Can't-Lighten-Up Dear Can't-Lighten-Up,In my high school, French was the only foreign language offered. We learned it playing "Tour du Monde" with vocabulary, drawing pictures of "fromage" and "papillon" for each other on the chalkboards in the House, wandering the streets of Angers and Paris and Aix ordering our first café au lait and pain au chocolat in giddy tones. I remember vividly one day after we had gotten out of class, I walked around the corner with my friend and we ducked our heads inside a patisserie, and we ordered in a rush two "religeuses." The woman behind the counter didn't look at my ratty hair in its pigtail braids and my very American purple winter coat (a hand-me-down from my sister, I think) and make a noise that meant, "American." She simply smiled and put the pastry in a small bag with a piece of tissue paper. "Bonne soirée" she called out after us. And I felt the rush of what the French call "joie" - joy.I was a junior the year that we sang Gabriel Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine." We used to rehearse the song in its delicate French in a crowded room with uneven and overly polished floorboards. I sat in a grey folding chair, tucked my feet under me, pushed that still-ratty hair behind my ears with my fingernails coated with blue sparkle. The song hushes in its final line to this - "Et de tes dons qu'il retourne comblé." And may our praises return filled with Your gifts. It isn't the exact translation - I'm not even sure I could translate it well, if I'm honest - but the last, hushed line, has the word, "comblé" which, whether or not I understood the line right, is a French word for "overjoyed." The verb "combler" is about filling, being filled.I tell you these stories because you are asking something about who God is, and what His attitude is about us. And I learned this from singing "Cantique de Jean Racine," from the woman in the patisserie by the Lycée David d'Angers, from my years of unkempt hair and hand-me-down winter coats: God is delighted.Delighted, overjoyed - we so often mistake those words for happy, or, more honestly, for naively cheerful or optimistic. We think that if we name those adjectives, we're making it sound like we (or God or both) aren't taking hurt seriously. That we have missed suffering. That we have lost sight of the ache of the world and are applying a pink band-aid to the gaping wounds.But it is the work of delight and joy to come close to suffering, even closer than the so-called serious realism. It is through joy, not cynicism, that we approach the unspeakably difficult.Because joy and delight are not happy feelings: they are the choices to let love win. They are the choice to trust love triumphant. Joy is a choice to believe God when He calls what He has made very good, and a choice to draw near to that very good world in its ache and terror and sadness.If you do not practice laughter, you cannot know this joy. If you do not practice the playfulness, the levity, the extravagant gestures without reason, the shrieks of hide-and-seek games, you cannot walk with us to the places where love is most needed and most difficult.God is overjoyed with us. God is delighted. Because He is these things, because He is delighted in my moment in the patisserie, eating something truly good and laughing with my friend, and wishing the woman kneading bread a "bonne soirée" - He can enact such an extravagant and mysterious story of love triumphant. Because God is delighted, because His delight is not some blithe or silly perpetual good mood, but the serious weight of everlasting love, He is able to save us.This is the story we are going to tell the world. The story of love triumphant over darkness. The story of joy and reuniting, of harmony and whole, of laughter and extravagance. But to tell it, and to tell it in the places most needed, we must practice those things in ourselves.So, dear one, this is the work of delight. It will take everything you've got, to live the blurred lines between sorrow and weeping and joy and splitting your sides laughing. It will take your whole self and a self transformed to banish the categories we've so carefully constructed around what counts as "serious" and what counts as "light," to sing while we cry and rage while we laugh.But I think it can be done. I think it must be done. So that, in the mystery of love triumphant, we can sing:Répands sur nous le feu de ta grâce puissante;Que tout l'enfer fuie au son de ta voix;Pour on us the fire of your powerful grace, O Lord,That all hell flees at the sound of Your voice.Love,hilary

i begin again

courage: to tell your story with your whole heart.we can't practice compassion with other people until we are kind to ourselves. This. It's this I have avoided and pretended not to know.But compassion -is a result of authenticity -of vulnerability.Nothing less.To have a compassionate imagination, as one friend named my dearest ambition over swirling wine glasses and chocolate cake, to walk into another person's very story- that takes the kind of gentleness we cannot know until we have done it. And we cannot do it without beginning at ourselves.I typed this blog post weeks ago, when I first discovered what felt at the time to be the most revolutionary, inspiring, terrifying, truthful talk I had ever heard. Brene Brown told her audience (and me) on her Ted talk that we cannot begin to be compassionate, to build connection, to grow in love, unless we are vulnerable.Really, she said, the people who live wholehearted don't think about whether vulnerability is particularly good or bad; they simply recognize that it is necessary.But last night I didn't want it to be necessary.I didn't want to build anymore. I didn't want to be vulnerable, to walk around with my thoughts on a blog or in the air against the black sky flecked with a lazy snowstorm. I didn't want to think anymore about whether I tell half the truth or the whole truth, whether there is a window into my heart or not.Sometimes the courage meets the hard place and the messy place and it seems to evaporate. Sometimes the Wednesday night heading home at 10:45 makes you think those words about authenticity and vulnerability are just words on a page without any reality, any connection to you, any roots.And maybe that's okay.Maybe it's okay to begin there. To begin again, there.Some days you hear beautiful and true things and you don't want them to be beautiful or true, and you begin there. Some days, you build bird by bird, brick by brick, and you have to pause and admit to yourself that bricks and birds are not always easy. And you begin there. And if you, wherever you are, find your courage meeting the harder places, find your eyes and arms a little weary, find your beginning in the bird by bird -I'm with you.We begin here.Love,hilary

dear hilary: no small work

Dear Hilary,There is a saying, "there are no small parts, only small actors." I think it's meant to tell us that we are all important, somehow, that our one line in a play is not less meaningful than the monologues, our place at the back of the corps de ballet is not unimportant, even if we might never be cast as the lead in Tchaikovsky. But Hilary, is that true everywhere? How can it? Aren't we supposed to want the work to be meaningful? Aren't we supposed to seek positions of influence and do good in them? Aren't there small jobs? And small work?Love,My work feels smallDear My work feels small,My answer is a resounding and beautiful and emphatic no. There is no small work. There is no small work in a world where something as simple and apparently stupid as being the person on the bus who always asks their seat neighbor how they are can change everything. There is no small work in a world where the right sentence in an email, the right amount of foam on a latte, the best swept ballroom or the newspaper print copy edited for the fiftieth time can be an expression of love.And it can always be that.The phrase about small parts and small actors leaves out the truth about small actors. They are not small because they wished for a bigger part - they are small because they didn't imagine how they might love and live wild in their small part. It isn't selfishness, I think, to want and long for meaningful work. It isn't selfishness to fall into the trap that tells us that meaning is attached to power. There is a lot of good we can do when our voices can speak speeches and our hands touch many people and our platforms have followers galore. There is a lot of good, a lot of beautiful, we can do when we can bend the ears and minds of those around us.But we will only do that good if we build, bird by bird, moment by moment, latte and copy edited letter and email and photocopy, a heart that's widened with an imagination for love.We have to build up a heart for love. And then we have to love.Do that, and there will be no small work.There will be days when the work feels small. When you wonder how any of it can be about love, or about influence, or about the big ideas we once had about changing the world. There will be days when the purpose of vacuuming eludes you. When the tenth meeting about the color of the balloons runs you ragged. When answering the phone feels as important as counting specks on the wallpaper. When you cannot think about babysitting for one more second before you think, I have no idea what this accomplishes in the world... I cannot promise you, my sweet friend, that we will always trust that our work matters. We probably won't. But if we do it even then? If we dare to tell ourselves in those moments that even this work (maybe especially this work), is always about the depth and quality of our love, the tenor and passion of our one-liner in the great play? If we dare to imagine ourselves away from the simple chasing after power?Oh, then, I think we will change the world.One latte, one photocopy. One smile, one remembered favorite coffee flavor for a coworker. One promise, one extra twenty minutes of laughter and compassion behind closed office doors, one email at a time.Because there is no small work in a world this hungry for love. I dare us to love it that much together.Love,hilary

for when it isn't time yet

I've been thinking about those big dreams we have. Sometimes people call them "the God-sized dreams." Sometimes we call them wild. Sometimes we call them brave or reckless or even the dumbest thing we've ever thought. At some point, I'm guessing you've heard yours call out to you, and you've said all these things and more about it.But the moment that we have this dream, even while we resist it and we run away from it? We also start to expect it to arrive. Immediately.We want progress towards the goal, we want to start running, we want to see the fruits of this big dream we can hardly dare to dream, and all right away.When we move across the country or the world, when we start the new program or job, when we give up the things that were familiar and safe because we have this dream of becoming something really unexpected and delightful, we unload our bags and think, "Where are you, dream?"Where is the fullness? Where is the business I've successfully started, the website with 3,000 views a day, the advanced degree with a specialization in metabolomics? Where is the person I've come to become? I've asked this almost every day since I graduated and set off to chase a big dream of writing, a dream of higher education, a dream of wild love. I drive along the same roads piled with melting snow and look at the same sunrise spilling through the black fingers of the trees, and I want to know, Why haven't I gotten my big dream yet? Do you think the answer might be, it isn't quite time?We weren't ever promised that we would receive in full what we envision at first. We weren't ever told that the dream would be anything but a hard, unknown, journey through the deep dark woods and bright fires and sunrises and years.Rumi says, "When I am silent, there is thunder hidden within me."Just because the dream you dream hasn't come true yet, doesn't mean it doesn't live and roar inside you. Just because you must walk through the many years of not knowing how it will come true doesn't mean that you were wrong about it.It just means that now is the time for your silence. It just means that now is the time for the thunder to be hidden within you.Maybe you see people around you who are thundering their dream to the world. Maybe they have the pageviews, the degree, the family, the words, the settledness you crave and envy. Maybe you wonder if that is ever going to be you.You, too, have thunder hidden within you.You, too, have a big dream that is worth a thousand years of walking without knowing where.You, too, with your suitcases and uncertainty, with your waiting and your silence, are in pursuit of a bold, wild kind of dream. Now is the time for silence as you take shape. Now is the time for listening to your roommates and friends and parents.  Now is the time to make midnight grocery store runs or watching a full season of The West Wing. Now is the time to pray in your car and slam the brakes for a turtle crossing the road.And when your thunderous dream bursts forth, and you step into the midst of it, it will roar all the brighter.Love,hilary

dear hilary: gripped by fear

Yesterday, this kind of amazing and crazy thing happened. I got to share over at Lisa-Jo's space, and I would love it if you'd visit me over that way? Just click here. And if you have a question for me to ponder with you? Just email me: letterstohilary@gmail.com

Dear Hilary,

I don't think of myself as a pessimist (and I don't think others do either) but I'm noticing my tendency to expect the worst. The phone rings and I think tragedy has struck. Someone pulls me aside and I instantly assume I'm in trouble. Sometimes the fear makes me sick to my stomach.  I know worrying isn't productive and most of the things I fear never come to fruition but logic isn't loosening fear's grip on me. How can I shake it?

Gripped

Dear Gripped,

I read your question and thought about it as I drove home from sign language class. I drove in silence, asking myself occasionally what fear is, where it comes from - what might we possibly do to shake ourselves free from it?

The words that came to me as I swung my car into the driveway, and trudged up the steps to my house through the slush and rain, through the night that always feels impossibly dark, were not my own words. They were Rilke's. I wonder if you know them, from his Letters to a Young Poet?

“Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

I don't pretend to really know what's going on in these words, because I'm far from having sounded the depths of much of anything. But, Gripped, I think Rilke's bigger point is that the opposite of fear is not only courage. It is also trust. 

We are all convinced that the things we do not know - the phone calls we haven't picked up, the being pulled aside by the teacher, the long silence from a friend, the unreturned email - they must be a monster. They must mean that terrible thing that we have always secretly wondered about, but never really tried to understand or imagine. Fear thrives on the things we don't want to know - thrives in darkness, in vague worry, in the unexamined and unaccepted. We too often keep ourselves from knowing the things we are afraid of. And so we do not trust them. And so the fear lives long.

To shake fear, I don't know that you always need to be brave as we typically define it. It doesn't mean being angry with yourself for your fear or trying to "outreason" or "outlogic" yourself or demanding that you suddenly be fearless.

Instead, perhaps we can shake fear by widening ourselves to receive all that the world holds for us. What might the experiences that have you shivering with fear hold for you that is rich and beautiful and good? What might they grow inside you? What might they help you become? What might the phone call bring you - can you imagine in the thirty seconds before you answer it being something marvelous? Can you widen, even if you just say it inside your head, your heart to accept this new thing?

Fear keeps you from being that fully alive self Rilke talks about: one who is open to even the most incomprehensible experiences, one who trusts that even those things which are strange and terrifying hold something good. Fear feeds on our uncertainties, but most of all, fear thrives on our lack of trust.

I think we shake it by repeating the gestures of trust over and over, in our head and in our life, until they are as natural as breathing: arms open, eyes wide, running toward the world.

It will undoubtedly disappoint us sometimes. It will be less than what we want. It will be too much. It will bring crappy phone calls and teachers yelling and family fights and silence and shouting. But all of this makes us more alive, Gripped. All of this, even the things you fear most this moment, can be the very things that are the making of you.

Trust me.

Love,hilary

dear hilary: on old flames

Dear Hilary,Do you think that it's a good idea to get back together with an ex? I'm wondering if it's a good idea, because while we fought, and it was hard, and a lot of us felt difficult and broken, there was a lot of good. And so now it feels like a real possibility, and I'm wondering if it's a good idea. What if we just hurt each other more? What if this is it, but we don't get back together and we leave it unfinished? Where do you even begin to go with that possibility?Love,Old FlamesDear Old Flames,Well, here is an interesting question, and an old one, and a good one. Do we step back into something that we left behind? Do we return to a landscape we have visited before? On the one hand, there is that warm call of familiarity. This person knows you, knew you in a moment in your life full of growth/change/becoming. They understand that habit you got into your 20s with folding your sheets or only ironing shirts the morning you wear them. This person knows your favorite movie when you were 5, what you think about taxes or the environment.On the other hand, there is that list of the things that fell apart - the way you couldn't fight fair, the misunderstandings that started over coffee and ended over listening and whether they cared at all about your feelings. The long nights of counting shadows on your bedroom wall thinking about everything else that might be out there, and could this be it? And the conversations where those thoughts slipped out and it felt like things broke all over again.So there you sit, with your old flame, who is wonderful and difficult and folds sheets weirdly and doesn't like Mexican food. There you sit, you who are wonderful and difficult and don't like parakeets and think James Bond is a total sap. You both come to this moment, and ask, do we go back?But that's not really the question. Relationships are only like places in that we live in them, that we make space in our hearts and minds for another. We cannot make the same space twice; because we are changing, and the person is changing. So you are never going back, if you and an old flame decide to pursue a relationship. You are going to build something new together, because you are meeting again as people weathered by the years or months apart. You are meeting, not as old flames, but as a possible fire.I can't tell you what to do - there isn't a universal rule about ex's and get togethers. Some work wonderfully; some don't. Some build back the patterns they had hoped to learn from; some build something entirely new. But always, I urge you to ask questions not from the perspective of wandering back into the past, but from the perspective of bringing all that you have learned from your past into your present. What did the first falling apart teach you both? What do you want it to teach you about this new possibility? Who have you each become in the time you were apart? Do those people fit together?Don't be anxious, sweetheart. These questions won't be checked off a mental to-do list before you make a decision; you'll ponder them lying awake in bed at night no matter what you do. Your gut will make the decision and you'll step into it, tentatively and boldly, with confidence and trembling. But ponder them with all your might, and listen closely to your heart. It will tell you whether to work out those questions alongside your former lover, or whether those questions are better pondered alone, in preparation for the next relationship.We do this work of love, whether with people we have just met or have known a ten thousand days, whether lovers or friends or teachers, by allowing our hearts to guide and be guided. By asking ourselves about the people we were, and are, and who we would dare to become, and letting those people point the way. In the great unfolding of your life, getting together with your ex is a sparkling silver thread; no matter what you choose, there is bound up in the choice itself such wonderful things to learn.The poet Robert Bly once wrote, "I love you with what in me is unfinished." Does it get more beautiful, Old Flames? Does it get more true?You are unfinished; your ex is unfinished. This choice will not finish or complete either of you or your life stories - it will only help you love with what is unfinished inside you.Love,hilary

dear hilary: on bringing sexy back

Dear Hilary,Right before Christmas I look at myself in the mirror and scold myself furiously for all the chocolate I've eaten. For the hours I didn't work out. For the way my stomach puffs out, and I lack good posture, and my eyes are an in-between color like my hair is and I never do anything to it and basically I'm just doomed to look like this. I want to change that. I hear people say it's possible, to love yourself, to think your own body is sexy. To think that your butt looks good in those jeans. To believe that, despite even the worst of worst hair days, out of me radiates a sexy, desirable glow.But no one tells you how to actually believe it. So I want to know.Love,Mirror, Mirror on the WallDear Brave Sexy Girl on Fire,I write this to you sitting on my unmade bed that is covered in approximately 5 shoes, a coat, a cell phone, a wool blanket, Christmas cards spilling out of their case, leftover work papers, ribbon and cough drops. I am wearing 4 inch high heels and orange running shorts and my sweaty white T-shirt, having just jumped around my room in said high heels to Usher's, "Scream" and P!nk's "Blow Me One Last Kiss" and the Glee mashup of "Rumor Has It" and "Somebody Like You". I jumped around my room. I shimmied. I swung my hips in what vaguely resembles a circle. I cha-chaed. I salsaed. I shook whatever could be shook. I put my hair down. I put my hands in the air. If there was sexy in the world, I brought it back.I changed your name when I wrote back to you, Brave Sexy Girl on Fire, because we don't get to see our heart's desire in the mirror when we call to it. We don't get to see the "fairest of them all". The problem with asking a mirror is that it will only show you what you already think. It will show you a snapshot of those nagging thoughts. It isn't a new voice; it's just an echo.But. What if you whispered, "I am a brave sexy girl on fire"?Just, what if you did that?What do you think would happen?I dare you to put on high heels and Usher. I dare you to jump around. I dare you to shout to your bedroom walls that you are a brave sexy girl on fire. I dare you to do it wearing a sweaty t-shirt, orange running shorts and four inch heels.It's cheesy, love, but it's true. We have to speak the truth out loud more often than we realize. We have to speak it out ahead of ourselves, so that when we wake up each morning and go to bed each night, it is already waiting for us. The truth about sexy isn't like logic. You can't commit it to memory. You can't plug yourself into one end of the equation and POOF! Out comes a belief on the other end.This is a truth that is three-dimensional, living, a heartbeat inside your heartbeat. This is a truth that you build, with every dance party. With every act of kindness, every smile to a stranger on the street, every dollar you pull out of your wallet to tip the girl at the coffee shop, every outfit that you rock in the morning (especially the ones with cowboy boots, neon pink, ruffles... you catch my drift). You build this belief in your own sexiness. In cupcakes and shimmying hips and three hours reading a good book and dreams about grad school and falling in love. You build it.So this letter ends with a dare. A dare to you, Brave Sexy Girl on Fire. I dare you to jump around dancing and saying, I am a brave sexy girl on fire over and over. I dare you to begin to build.Because you don't have to do a single thing different to glow like the French sky on Bastille Day. You don't need to do anything to your hair or your stomach or your eyes or your hair to have the glow. It is already so gut-wrenchingly radiating out from you I can see it, right now. I can see it in your letter. That's why I name you Brave Sexy Girl on Fire. Because I can see you, glowing, all the way from here.I dare you to revel in it.Love,hilary

dear hilary: on extraordinary gifts

Dear Hilary,How do you give gifts to people for Christmas, gifts that mean something, gifts that are treasures, and not just one more shiny wrapping paper token?Love,Confused by AdvertisingDear Confused by Advertising,This is what I imagine giving.I imagine wrapping up your red truck. I give it to you shyly, keys already in your pocket, Dunkin' Donuts cups in the cupholders waiting for us. I give it and we drive, miles on the tires and country on the radio, and some days it's quiet in our hearts and some days it's loud. But you make me this home, brother. You make me this space in your life, this space of welcome even in the late summer evenings and the long thunderstorms. So I give you the breakfasts at the Depot and the kids flying into your arms on your way back from Communion, your steady hug after once again, I've hurt my heart in longing and disappointment. I give you the forever love of a big sister who's in awe of you.I imagine holding out a cup of tea to you, no wrapping paper. We are only at the beginning of knowing each other, and it's only been a little while since we first sat in Starbucks and laughed about boys and swapped stories about our journeys at Gordon and our hopes for the future. But I give you this cup of tea, this promise, because even at the beginning of this friendship I can feel your care radiating out from you. I give you this cup of tea (and maybe a truffle, too) - with a small smile, knowing that we have so much to look forward to. Knowing that the beginning of the story of knowing you is more beautiful and more worthwhile than I could have dreamed.I imagine giving you a framed picture of us on your wedding day. It wasn't very long ago, you know, but that day, I remember giving a toast from a napkin hidden in my pocket and falling down the stairs and all the while I was overwhelmed  by the joy of watching you make those big promises. I want to tell you with this gift that we're always and forever family, and I will love you fierce through these new seasons and this new world that we've stepped into. I will tell you as I give you the gift, that no matter what, when I think about our room and NCIS and baking cookies and not finishing my books because you want to paint our nails, that I will rejoice. Because you are rare. Because the love of sisters is rare.I imagine I would give you a plane ticket to Michigan. It doesn't have a date on it, just the destination, but I'd hand it to you as part of a promise, that distance stretches us and grows us. I would give it to you with the long afternoons that stretch into evenings of macaroni and cheese and Entemann's raspberry danish and tea, and Searching for Bobby Fisher and dance movies, and always the moment when I reach for the blanket I love and look over, and know that you are still there. That no matter what, when I call or worry or doubt again, you hold all my questions next to me and laugh and somehow, the world brightens. I'd give you the plane ticket with that same laugh, the snow outside bright.You see, Confused by Advertising, our hearts know the gifts we must give better than we do - the gifts of the people we've been given to share this life with, these miraculous beautiful heartwrenching friends and family and mentors and inspirations who walk into our lives and transform us.Don't worry about the right iPod case. Don't worry about the better gadget or kitchen appliance or the newest Spiderman movie. Don't worry about homemade chocolate.Look at each of those people, the ones who hold you up when you fall apart, the ones who walk into your office and offer you a word of hope. Look at each of them, and with all of your heart, just say thank you.Because all of this is gift from another Giver. Because when we empty ourselves of the need to impress and dazzle, we find simply that we are thankful.So give thanks.Love,hilary

dear hilary: monsters in the closet

Dear Hilary,Have you ever been afraid of something? Afraid to ask yourself something honestly, for fear of what it would look like? Afraid to ask yourself "why" this was happening, because of what you thought you might say in response?What did you do?Love,AfraidDear Afraid,My closest friend and I, we have a saying: brave new shit. BNS. It stands for all the things we do that defy our fear. It stands for all the things we originally said were completely impossible, the conversations, confrontations, internal moments of honesty, risks. It stands for the believing work we do: believing in being beautiful in defiance of magazines or mirrors, believing we are capable in spite of the mountain of work, believing in descending into that murky pit of ourselves because we know that there is something good there.We are all afraid of the monsters in our closet. In polite conversations at dinner parties, they're not invited. They don't stand with us in our shiniest, brightest moments - they don't live in the open sipping a mint julep with you and your best friends on a sticky Southern afternoon. They live in the shadowier parts of us, and so we don't know them as well.You're afraid of what you think lurks behind your sadness or your frustration or your stories. You're afraid that it might be much bigger than it seems. You're afraid it might be much smaller. I wish I could tell you that it is one thing or another - but the truth is, I don't know. No one does. The closet belongs to you, so we can't peek inside for you and tell you that there's nothing to be afraid of.But you can tell yourself that. You can put on "It's Time" by Imagine Dragons and start journaling. Crack the door of that closet open, and yell - "Come out, come out, whoever you are!" And you can sit with yourself on a couch somewhere, alone or with people, and fling the door open, crying and smiling and laughing, and say, "Who are you, monsters in my closet?" You can do some brave new shit and offer yourself some time to ask nothing but, "why?" - no judgment. No self-condemnation. No guilt. Just curiosity. "Come out, come out, whoever you are."I can't tell you what those monsters are. But I can tell you that your monsters, big or small, are always welcome on the front porch of the people who love you. Those people who love you will love those monsters, love them fiercely and do battle with them next to you and hold you when you discover that they are not so fierce or frightening.I bet you all the monsters in your closet plus mine plus the thousands of people who stand alongside us, all the young and old, all the fearful and brave, all the wild and all the free: you will be loved even more deeply for opening that closet door. Not just by all of us in this big world. But by you, too. You will know yourself better, love yourself better, give yourself a bit more grace if you look at them honestly, lovingly, with grace. BNS isn't just about confronting the things you don't know, Afraid. It's about bringing grace to those confrontations, especially when they are inside you. It's about being careful with yourself, not harsh. Fling that door open, and look at everything inside you gently. It deserves your attention. It deserves your time.That's the real secret of meeting the monsters in your closet: you will grow in love.Love,hilary