“I am not sure I’m a good person,” he said after a while.
“I’m not sure I am, either,” I said. “I’m winging it.”
When I read this conversation in We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, I just had to stop reading and absorb it. If we’re lucky, there’s a moment like that in every book we read and the thinking it provokes might very well be the reason why we were meant to open that book.
The reason that little conversation grabbed me by the throat was its crystal clear truthfulness. I read that sentence about winging it and thought, “don’t we all feel this way?”
Isn’t that the relief of books, that the vulnerability of the characters we get to know over hundreds of pages remind us that we are not alone?
So, the way I figure it, we are all winging it (at everything, really). And as we wing it, we hope that we are in some way good, enough, worthy, right. And while you might think you need to be perfect, you should know- we should all know– that winging it is plenty good, plenty enough because it is in our winging it that we practice and in our practice that we return to our intention and that when we practice we get closer to being it and that effort we make, every day, is what heals the world. It is our effort, our heart, our hope that heals the world.
So I’ll keep trying and I know you will, too, and one day we’ll look up and know that that goodness we sometimes doubted really was there, and it made things better.
