Life is Beautiful…and Delicate: Embracing Precarity

I don’t have doors on my kitchen cabinets.

Let me back up. This post is about a really important word, but it will make more sense if we start with cabinets.

We bought my grandmother’s home 8 years ago and have slowly been making it our own. One of the first things that I wanted to do was transform the kitchen. But there was no extra money, so DIY it was!

We took down the half wall dividing the kitchen and dining room, put in a countertop, and laid that click-together laminate floor that was the manager’s special at the local hardware store. I took down 40 years’ worth of wallpaper layers and patched and painted the walls. The facelift was quick, inexpensive, and notable. But my grandmother’s original 1970’s cabinets stared more boldly at me, surrounded by fresh coats of paint and shiny new floors. Cabinets were definitely not in the budget, so I turned to the next best thing: cabinet paint.

Cabinet painting is quite the process. It involves taking off and labeling all the doors and storing them with their hardware. There’s so much cleaning. There’s sanding, filling holes and cracks, cleaning again (did I mention how much cleaning there was?), and priming. I finally was able to watch the transformation as my paintbrush covered the old wood with strokes of farmhouse gray. Ah…everything was going well in my world. All I had left to do was paint the doors and reinstall them.

But I put my project aside because I started to get sick. What I thought was just a stomachache that lasted for weeks turned out to be our sweet Lael Joy taking up residence in my belly. I suppose I could have finished painting, but I wanted to be careful. I wanted to give her the very best chance of being the very healthiest. So, I put aside my project. I rested. I ate so carefully. I exercised and stayed calm.

And that May we welcomed her into the world with a surprise extra chromosome, a hole in her heart, and a blood disorder that we quickly learned was a form of leukemia.

It was then that I learned of the word precarity. At it’s core, precarity means the state of being uncertain or a state of persistent insecurity. This word was most popular 100 years ago, but as is the case, was replaced by words like hazardous, perilous, or risky. But those substitutes don’t quite do the word justice. There’s just no other word like precarity. Precarity doesn’t truly mean any of these things at all.

When Lael entered my world, I became a student of life’s precarity. I never would have considered myself someone with rose colored glasses, but any rosy tint to my lens was washed away that day with no hope of returning. We always say there are things in life we cannot control, but we never truly consider that those “things” could happen to us. Not really. I found myself constantly living in a state of being uncertain. And before you think that’s a bad thing, I would counter that it’s actually a very healthy thing. It’s “the” thing that keeps us from getting too comfortable, from settling, from growing stagnant.

You cannot truly experience life without precarity. There is an unexpected delicacy to every aspect of this existence. One minute we are planning the perfect kitchen, the next we are welcoming an unexpected baby, and the next we have signed up for a lifetime of caregiving to a child born with vastly different abilities than our others. Ok, that’s my story, but you have your own. You don’t have to be a special needs parent to be able to point to a moment when you had to abandon your own cabinet doors because life handed you something unexpected. And some of us have never gone back to those doors because of how delicate that something turned out to be.

But life is beautiful because it is delicate. Only in the balance of experiencing the good and braving the brokenness, do we find true beauty and purpose.

If I could go back to the woman who was painting the kitchen cabinets, I would take her face in my hands and tell her to celebrate all the good, ordinary, mundane moments…like, really celebrate them. Make a cake for no reason. Stay up late and play a game with the kids. Sleep in and start the day later than expected. Go for a walk. Go to the park. Call people. Love radically. Because there are times and seasons when you cannot do these things. And that’s o.k. too. I would also tell her to not rush those seasons. Settle into those. Not for the purpose of staying there, but for the purpose of cultivating courage, embracing challenges, and learning something new about this fragile life that we’re gifted.

We walk this tightrope every day, teetering between joy and pain, happiness and sorrow, hope and despair. We are all vulnerable to the unpredictable twists and turns of life, and the beauty and brokenness that comes with it.

We cannot fully appreciate the beauty without experiencing the brokenness of life.

Precarity gifts us with this contrast to embrace. The contrast of the immeasurable joy of holding a brand-new baby while grieving the life you had hoped and dreamed for her. The contrast of watching your child succeed at something they love to do while hustling every day to make that something happen. The contrast of being surrounded by your loved ones while having seasons of letting them go. We all know precarity. But few of us embrace it.

My sweet girl that taught me about precarity will turn five in just a short while. And my kitchen cabinets have remained in the corner, primed but not painted. My cabinets hold my dishes without doors to cover up them up. And it drives me crazy. I want order and perfection, but they serve as a reminder that it’s o.k. to not always be able to follow through with our best intentions. It’s o.k. that priorities change. It’s o.k. that our lives can look completely different from one another. It’s o.k. that we do all the right things, and we don’t get the intended result. It’s frustrating. It’s irritating. It’s mind-numbing at times. But it’s o.k. It will be o.k. And then it won’t be. And then it will be. Because life is full of precarity.

Friends, I hope you’re in a season of beauty. I hope you can take out the good dishes tonight, even if you’re just serving pizza on them. I hope you can sleep in freshly washed sheets and take a hot shower. I hope you drink your coffee while it’s still hot and you find yourself getting out your mixing bowl and favorite dessert recipe just because. But if you’re not, I hope you know you’re in an equally important season where the tears are food for your soul and the prayers through clenched fists and sometimes screamed in the car are heard and working something beautiful in your story. I hope you know that you can sit in your pain as long as you need to in order to find the strength and resolve to elevate and ascend again. I hope you know you’re not in the valley because of lack of faith or some wrongdoing. We all spend time there.

But the flowers that grow in the valley are breathtaking. The streams are cool. And there’s shade to rest in.

So whether you have fancy dishes or cool streams, know you’re right where you’re supposed to be. And it’s perfectly fine if you never have doors on your cabinets again because you might have more important things to tend to first.