You’re carrying something heavy that almost no one knows about.
Maybe even you forget it most days—until something reminds you.
This is a small ritual for that kind of weight.
I want to talk about that thing that you’re carrying. Actually not the thing itself, but the experience of carrying it. Or I should say, the non-experience of carrying it. Let me explain.
My guess is that people don’t know you’re carrying it. It’s not something you tell people, beyond that very small select few. And even people that know what you carry might not suspect how heavy it is or how long it feels like you’ve been carrying it.
And sometimes it’s as if you don’t know either.
Part of you always “knows” of course. I mean, if you were asked directly by someone to look inside privately to see what you’re carrying, you would be able to name it, probably right away, maybe before the question is even finished being asked. Even as you read this it has probably come to mind. You see? It isn’t that deeply buried. But the knowledge of it is normally held in **abeyance**, a merciful pause on knowledge. Abeyance is an old word and an old concept. I know you’re aware of denial, and dissociation, and our capacity to self-deceive. But before we had the concept of denial or self-deception, we had the idea of abeyance.
Like I said, it’s a pause on knowledge. The pause is temporary, waiting for the right time. Or the right space. Or until you can stop carrying something else.
This isn’t pathological. It’s not denial in the clinical sense. It’s practical. It’s how we survive when there’s more to carry than we have hands for.
So, that’s you not experiencing the thing you’re carrying.
But now, what do you do with that abeyance queue?
The answer is not to force it into the open, to expose the whole queue, and the resultant flood of awareness. That would be cruelty, not mercy.
Here’s a small ritual:
Find a timer. Notice I said **find** a timer, not **set** a timer. Yes, we all have timers and stopwatches and trackers almost bulging out of our phones and watches. You could set one of those.
But don’t.
You have enough cold machines tracking your time already. Not for this ritual.
Find a natural time-limited behavior or rhythm.
Do you make coffee in the morning? There’s that space of time while the beans are grinding, or while the coffee is brewing, or while that cup you ordered in the drive-through gets cool enough to drink.
Maybe you walk up a flight of stairs to your office, or take an elevator? Use the time it takes to do that.
Or consider any of the personal grooming habits of your morning or evening. Anything that has a beginning and an end with a few minutes in the middle can work, as long as you can do it on autopilot.
Pick one of those or something like it.
During those minutes, acknowledge the queue, the lined-up-carried-things.
Maybe say “*This is what I’m carrying*.”
Allow yourself to see the image of it that comes to you. It has length, maybe width, and possibly even weight. You are not pushing for knowledge. You are inviting knowledge. But these are not clean, sanitized facts. The fibers are emotional, maybe even deeply so. Allow the space to widen inside, making room for the knowing. This is a kind of hospitality, a welcoming of things that have had no space of their own.
For the duration of your “timer” simply observe what happens and how it feels.
There might be words, or names. There might even be a closing of a window, a slamming of a door. If so, that is what you learned this time. The best practice of hospitality also allows the guest to refuse to enter.
Maybe this time, or maybe the next, you will see the line of things you have been carrying, individual things, all with their own urgency, or danger, or sadness. Allow yourself to host them graciously.
When your “timer” is done, be still for one more moment while you breathe in and out.
You’re done. That’s the ritual.
What needs to surface will surface, in its own time, within the hospitality you’ve created. That is your goal—to be hospitable to these burdens that have been waiting their turn, because it hasn’t been their time yet.
Or maybe today it becomes the time for one of them. Either way, you have done your part for today. You have attended to your inner world with mercy and hospitality.
Go on with your day, and return again to the ritual tomorrow.
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