Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

We can’t afford to live lives we have to fool our own central nervous systems into tolerating.

occasional glimpses of God in a crowd.

I had once not known how to manage an emergency, or a difficult meeting, or a home renovation, and now I did. Maybe I could learn to subvert my own wants the same way—with processes and contingency plans and occasional meltdowns.

“You are perilously close to having the life you’ve always wanted,” she says. “It’s not surprising to me that you would panic.”

“I think part of me thought you were going to have a heart attack and die,” I tell him. “I know, baby,” he says.

I wanted every day to feel like a movie montage, or at least to end in an epiphany, or at least to have a clear narrative arc, or at least to make some level of sense.

I will have figured out that sometimes pursuit just means paying close attention to the story while it emerges in its own damn time.