Just About
I love a road that’s just about to bend. A season that’s just about to start. A concept that’s just about to jell enough to actually become a thing. Energy lives in those “just about” moments. The giddy kind that makes you think there is no lid on the sky.
“Always” and “nevers” are skinny slivers with not much room for play, but “almosts” have lots of space where imagination can run and jump. The possibility that lies right around the corner from an “almost” beckons like a giant index finger curling itself back toward its palm. You might get what you think you want. You might get something better. You might not get anything but more of the same. You might get a bottomless pit. There is no way to know what’s coming. Not really. Even if you’ve been down that road a thousand times before.
That’s what gives “just abouts” their punch. Possibility floats around, above, and in between them like red and yellow leaves on a windy autumn day.
When my daughter was in preschool, she came home one day with a crooked stick about ten inches long and as big around as her daddy’s thumb. It was gray and gnarly like the ones we use for kindling when we start a fire. But this particular stick was wrapped in all kinds of colorful paraphernalia. Bright pink ribbon, orange pipe cleaners, and a fancy cobalt blue fuzzy tie with a marble on the end adorned it like Sunday finery. The stick looked like a magnificent art project, but I could tell it carried more weight than that. I was most curious to find out why. So I asked her.
“This is cool!” I said. “What is it?”
To which my precocious four-year old replied, “It’s a possibilities stick.”
I could not have been more intrigued.
“A possibilities stick,” I said aloud, trying to get my brain to catch up with the words.
“Yeah,” she said, “This is what you hold when you want to make something possible.”
“Like a magic wand?” I asked.
“No, It’s for real stuff,” she said, with her four-year old serious eyes.
Could there ever in the history of ever be a better project to create at school?
I could hardly wait to ask her Pre-K teacher about it at parent-teacher night. I was just overwhelmed by the visionary thinking of a young teacher steeped in Play-Doh and finger paint. When I did, we both shared a pretty good laugh. She told me what the students made in class were talking sticks. You held them when it was your turn to speak. That’s how the almost ready for school kids learned to communicate in a group. That’s not what my daughter heard. Oh the way some things land differently on individual ears and hearts! The teacher and I both agreed that while it might be tough in application, “possibilities” was, in fact, a much better name for the stick wearing colorful clothes.
I have no idea where my daughter’s interpretation came from, but we used it every chance we got through the years, and it sits on a shelf in my house still. Sometimes I randomly pick it up when the road is about to curve.
This cusp of newness, the place where possibility lives, is a space that we don’t have a name for yet. “Just about” is the fulcrum on which some die a thousand deaths, but it’s also the place where it’s hard for most of us to control our happy feet. Ask any athlete about how it feels the night before the season’s opening game. Of all the games that happen after, nothing ever feels the same. When the concert is just about to start, when the bride is just about to walk down the aisle, when the baby is just about to emerge from the canal and show you her giant sky-blue eyes, life feels bouncy. Anticipation is not a big enough word for that.
‘Well, said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because
although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before
you began to eat it which was better than when you were , but he didn’t know what
it was called.”
I hear you, Pooh. I feel it right before the tulips bloom, and the cold front hits, and the chorus strikes in Chris Tomlin’s “God Who Listens.” My heart gets the zoomies like my granddaughter gets right before it’s time for bed.
Years ago (before upside down squeeze bottles), Heinz Ketchup had an ad campaign anchored by Carly Simon’s blockbuster hit, “Anticipation.” The commercials’ stars ranged from ornery little boys to a female babysitter to a June Cleaver mom. Each had the world by the tail as they eagerly waited for the thick ketchup to emerge from the bottle. The tag line always read: “worth the wait.”
Some things are. (The ketchup was!) And some things aren’t. But the right before part rarely disappoints.
The “just abouts” are just about as good as it ever gets.