This one when your love is in pain,
And you're in the room,
The silence is loud,
You don't know what to say,
So you start looking for the solution,
The reframe,
The advice,
The thing that will make it better.
That impulse comes from love,
But sometimes love doesn't need a solution,
It needs a witness.
Find your seat,
Feet flat on the floor,
Hands open on your legs,
Bring your attention to the hands,
Feel the urge there,
The readiness to do something,
To hand someone an answer,
To pick up the problem and carry it,
Let the hands stay open,
Nothing to fix right now,
Nothing to hand anyone,
Move to the chest.
When someone you love is hurting and you can't resolve it,
What happens in there?
A tightening,
A kind of helplessness that feels almost unbearable,
That feeling is not weakness,
That's what it costs to care about someone without being able to take the pain away,
Most men were never taught what to do with that cost,
So they go straight to solving,
Not because they don't care,
Because caring without acting feels like failing,
But it isn't failing,
It's the hardest thing.
Holding space is not passive,
It takes everything you have to stay in a room full of someone else's pain and not try to drain it,
To just be there,
Solid,
Quiet,
Present,
Without an agenda,
Without a solution waiting in your back pocket.
The people you love don't always need you to make it better,
They need to know that their pain doesn't scare you away,
That you can sit with hard things without needing them to resolve that you're not going anywhere,
That is not nothing,
That is everything.
I can be with someone's pain without needing to remove it,
My presence is the support,
I do not have to fix this to be useful,
Staying is an act of strength,
I can hold space without holding it together for them.
Let the hands stay open,
Let the chest have a little more room,
Let the jaw release whatever it's been holding.
You were not built only to solve things,
You were also built to stay,
To be the kind of presence that makes someone feel less alone in the hard parts,
That's not a small thing for a lot of people,
It's the most important thing anyone has ever done for them.
Take a fuller breath,
Let the room come back,
The next time someone you love needs you to just be there.
Remember this,
Hands open,
Feet on the ground,
Chest soft enough to hold something without crushing it.
You don't have to fix it,
You just have to stay.
