Three Sentences That Have Carried Me Through Hard Days
Not affirmations. Not slogans. Three quiet things I have come back to for years.
There are sentences I copy in the back of every notebook. They are not slogans, not affirmations, not the kind of thing you would find on a poster. They are sentences that arrived at the right hour, and have stayed.
Here are three.
"This too is impermanent."
When something hard is happening, this is the sentence I return to first. Not as denial. Not as don't worry, it'll pass. As a reminder that the present feeling — this tightness in the chest, this overwhelm, this small ache of disappointment — is moving. The mind, in distress, behaves as if the distress is permanent. The mind lies. The sentence is the small, plain truth: this too is impermanent.
It also works in the opposite direction. When something good is happening — a meal, a conversation, a small rest — the sentence reminds me to be present at it. Because this too is impermanent.
"I am here, and I am safe enough."
Not safe absolutely. Not promised anything. Safe enough — a phrase I learned from a therapist who heard me trying to bargain with my anxiety for total safety, which is not on offer.
I say this when the body is uneasy and the room is, in fact, fine. The chair holds. The ground holds. The breath is moving. The catastrophe I have been rehearsing in the mind is not, at this moment, happening.
Safe enough is the small floor beneath which I will not let the mind fall.
"I do not have to fix this right now."
Most things I am turning over at 11 p.m. cannot be fixed at 11 p.m. They will need to be fixed in daylight, by waking people, with tools I do not have on the bedside table.
The sentence is permission. Permission to put the problem down for the night. Permission to trust the morning. Permission to not perform the labor of solving in the body, when the labor of solving needs to happen elsewhere.
There is a version of this sentence for any time of day: not at this meal, not in this five minutes, not before the deadline of this small task. The work that needs doing will get done. Not all of it now.
What these sentences are for
They are not magic. They do not make the difficulty disappear. They simply give the mind something true and small to hold while a larger truth — this is hard, and you are doing the best you can — does its slow work.
Find your own sentences. They will arrive when you need them. Copy them down when they do.
You will be glad to have them later.