Time to Land…Let The Air Clear

Let the world unwind the turmoil. Not you.

I want to say that again because it matters. Let the world unwind it. Not you. You are not responsible for holding the chaos together or pulling it apart. That is already in motion and it was in motion before you woke up this morning and it will still be working itself out long after you go to bed tonight. Your job is not to fix it. Your job is to stay standing while it moves.

It always gets worse before the clouds break and the sun truly comes out. Always. Not sometimes. Not usually. Always. And the reason it gets worse is not bad luck or bad leadership or bad timing. The reason it gets worse is because confrontation decomposes what was hiding. The swamp gets stirred. Things that were sitting on the bottom come up. That is not collapse. That is cleaning.

I know this because I cleaned my frog pond this morning.

It was real bad. I had been putting it off and putting it off the way you do when you know a job is going to be ugly and there is always something easier to do first. But this morning I went out there and looked at it and it was time. The water had gone dark. Thick. Things floating that had no business floating. And the smell — I want you to understand the smell — it will stop you where you stand. It is the kind of smell that makes you take a step back and reconsider your choices in life.

But I got the bucket and I started pulling the bad water out.

Here is the part that I think about. Here is the part that most people would miss if they were just trying to get through an unpleasant job as fast as possible. I did not throw that water out. I walked it over to my roses. To the things along the fence line I want to grow. I poured every bucket of that dark stinking pond water right at the roots.

Because that water is fertilizer.

As bad as it smells, as dark and dead as it looks, it is packed with nutrients. Everything that decomposed in that pond broke down into exactly what a living growing thing needs to push up and bloom. The worst of it feeds the best of it. That is not a metaphor I invented. That is just what happens when you understand what decomposition actually is.

So I kept going. Bucket after bucket. Let the bad water do something useful on the way out. Scrubbed the walls of the pond down. Got into the corners. Put it back in order the way it was meant to be. Then fresh water. Pump running again, circulating, bringing the oxygen back through so everything in there can breathe.

Took a while. Smelled bad the whole time. Looked worse before it looked better.

But it is clean now.

That is the same process happening out in the world right now. The confrontation you are watching, the exposure, the mess being dragged up into the light, the smell of things that have been sitting on the bottom for a long time — that is not the end of something. That is the cleaning of something. And when it is done it will be cleaner than it has been in a long time and things will grow that could not grow before because the nutrients are finally moving.

You do not have to manage it. You do not have to fix it or explain it or take a side in every argument that floats past you this week. You just have to not let it knock you off your feet while the work gets done.

Find somewhere solid to stand.

Let the water clear.

Time to land.

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