What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.

George MacDonald

I can’t say I knew what would happen… In this life, I-could-see-that-coming and I-couldn’t see that coming both amount to the same thing, because in neither case did you make a difference. What happened next I didn’t make happen. 

This is Happiness, Niall Williams

For seven, yes seven years, I’ve been searching for this quote from George MacDonald. You might say the quote was saving me at a time.  I had the quote handwritten and pinned to a small board next to my office desk before I retired.  I read these words every day and I longed to release the fear that kept me from following this truth. It’s a wonder to have a man write words just for me to find 150 years later.

The story doesn’t end or begin with that posted note. I have a long history of coming upon the restlessness of “what next” instead of seeing what is right in front of me.  For those few years George’s words sat next to me, I struggled to attend to the moment, no matter which way I might want to time travel for a different view. 

While George MacDonald was an old Scotsman, Niall Williams is a companionable, contemporary Irishman.  Two of his books, This is Happiness and The Year of the Child, are linked by the characters of the imaginary village of Faha in the far west of Ireland during the 1950’s and 60’s. The characters’ lived experiences are far removed from my own, but I know them inside me. 

In both of Niall Williams books, he weaves together the lives of neighbours and strangers who are doing as well as they can.   What happens to them in the present floats between the past and future in ways that make them seem as one life continuously lived, one day at a time.  

I find myself doing a lot of remembering lately.  Where I am now, I couldn’t have imagined in those days I’m recalling. There is also another set of stories that colour my world: the stories I create in my mind that are full of woe and occasionally wonder, the conversations I replay that unjustly perceive or unconsciously heal, and the actions I silently access that shape my responses. I might wake up fraught with stories I made up out of fear:  the what if’s, the carefully crafted judgements, perceived solutions that cause me to miss opportunities to do what I’ve been given without second guessing or trying to figure it all out. Is foregoing all that tangle of thought what “giving myself the least trouble” means?

How can I learn to rest between glimmers of hope and the truth that I am not in control of “next,” no matter what comes?

Just like Noel Crow, the 78 year old narrator of This is Happiness, who remembers the summer he turned 17. As Noe reflects on a transformative turn that began when he stopped at the local chemist’s door. (I don’t want to give too much away so you can read it for yourself.) He had no idea how this spontaneous visit would turn out.  He didn’t know that there would be times in life that pass but “retain a gleaming, which means they never die, and the light of them is in you still.”  When that same helpless longing to make things turn out alright, would see him “into and out of all the unscripted tumult, joys and mistakes that constitute a lived life.”  When he opened the door he had no speech prepared, only that shining. Ready for what came next.