When I think about what I want, knowing it isn’t selfish to want things, not even a shred of me says wealth in money or in a charming career — though I hope to always steward our work and our finances well. That’s not me being low maintenance and modest. What I want is experience and memory and all the art in the world. I want to be good and wise and know a lot. To have in my arsenal an elderly appreciation of life before really getting old. Maybe that’s my age talking. I don’t want to be perfect as long as it’s still unreachable, but I want to pen ten million words and I want to have been alive enough to say that I’ve seen the same classic film for three decades, each adaptation somehow worse than the original.

But I am just barely twenty-six. I have not yet enjoyed the feast of my thirties, forties, fifties, and on. I don’t concede to the idea that we ought to hurry our lives up to “get to the good parts,” but if there was available to us a way to expedite firm knowledge, a clear grasp, a higher understanding, a keen sense of judgement, wouldn’t you take it? A mentor once said, unlucky for me, something like only failure and small pieces of regret beget the warm fire of wisdom.

If you’re unlike me, perhaps you’re out there, senses engaged, living a full life unbothered. But if this rings true for you, too, perhaps you’re needing the same reminder that the speedy road to sanctification does not respond timely to want. In a month whirling with goals, intentions, and many, many wants which are not bad, don’t be afraid to break it back down into bites that suit your size. Rather than the complete mastery of life, what about the rich seeds of discipline?

Ask someone wiser than you how to do it, do it miserably wrong, and let the coldness of that inch you closer. Toward mercy, perspective, revelation, ten million words. And on that day which you swore’d never come, you’ll wring your hands at the warm fire of wisdom and let some twenty-six-year-old beneath you catch a flash. You’ll tell them to enjoy being made and that, indeed, one of the greatest disadvantages of hurry is that it takes way too long (G.K. Chesterton). And that after all this time it was just a deeper union with God you were after, which come to find out is better than all the art in the world.

This December was a doozy, as were the months that prepared us for it. I quit my job, we traveled, attended a widespread slew of christmases, married our friends, and at last came home to a neglected apartment that had gotten too cold in our absence. I’ll pack her all up in the span of twenty days and break our lease a year prematurely. Ringing in the new year unemployed and without a home. Not without a roof over our heads, though, which is a sobering practice of gratitude for me right now.

I spent the latter half of yesterday curled up with my dog who I hadn’t seen. Careful on the bottled water so I needn’t disrupt our peace for the bathroom. We laid quietly and felt shivers of life come back to us. From the couch over, innocently, Ryan started rehearsing the plans for tomorrow. Sun up to sundown packed with more to do, and the startings of stillness in me reacted violently after being compromised without proper warning. I guess there really is no such thing. I snapped at him with an unfair jab and he followed each closing door into the bedroom to meet me.

I cried on top of the sheets about how easy it is for people but not for me. My energy’s depleted and nothing sounds fun anymore. I feel like his wearable weight that holds his feet back from any good thing, because he could continue on for days with bells, but of course it’s not the same without his wife. This wife, me, a slave to her limits. He cries, too, and makes me look at him. When my head dips low, he says it again: Look at me. He wants a wife that’s happy, healthy, and whole more than he wants any empty thing we deem good. My guilt gets small, and I am grateful.

Now we’re hungry and our fridge taunts us with a single carton of egg whites and mineral water. We migrate to the bathroom to talk about dinner. Ryan sits on the edge of the tub while I clean the stubborn pieces of makeup that won’t leave my face. He asks what sounds good and the silence stings for more than a minute. “I could go for an In-N-Out burger if I didn’t weigh a hundred and fifty-five pounds and if their fries tasted good.” Goddamnit. He looks at me through the mirror as the globby tears start again. “When did you weigh yourself?” He knows I don’t do that. At the doctor last week when they found the dissolving cyst, nearly gone. Another sobering moment of gratitude.

We settle for noodles and soup and he goes out into the night to retrieve it while I regain composure. I put a cool mask under my sandbag eyes and we have just enough wine to fill my glass. I go online to see that I’ve regretfully missed what seems to be the best Texas sunset we’ve had in a long time. And at first, I mourn the idea that the spoils of insecurity kept me from even a single peek out my window to see. But then a hush of gratitude which pacified my drunken mind; Even when we cannot see, or worse, choose not to, he’s there working. We’ll twirl the blinds in, close the curtains, and melt down about our lack just inside, but he’ll color the sky still — not skipping a beat because his people do. Precisely the opposite. We are not limitless, friends, our bodies not meant to keep up, despite everything we’ve been told. I guess I want to say to all of us, don’t be afraid to reach the end and abandon ship to our Help whose joy is to find us happy, healthy, whole.