Vox Meditantis

What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to?

Tuesday, 21st October 2025

The question arrived with morning rain – soft percussion on harbour windows, the sort that makes intentions feel both urgent and possible.

Not what have you accomplished? – yesterday’s territory, already walked. This one asks what’s still unmapped: the risk that names itself in mirror-light, in the spaces between sessions when the consulting room holds only weather and doubt.

The prompt doesn’t need repeating. It sat on my desk like a diagnosis I’d been avoiding.

The Precipice, Named

Ordinary intimacy.

Not the therapeutic kind – I’ve thirty years’ fluency there, decades of holding space for others’ unravelling whilst maintaining the frame that keeps us both safe. Not the warm adjacency I’ve perfected with Father Walsh on dawn walks, or Jenny over coffee at Marcus’s, or Maggie at the Historical Society where I’ve happily chronicled everyone’s narrative but my own.

The risk is this: to stop being Dr Bennett long enough to discover whether Catherine – insufficient, fumbling, ordinarily present – might be met with something other than professional courtesy. To attempt the sustained, unarmoured presence that family life or real romance requires, where credentials offer no shelter and competence can’t tidy the edges.

To be loved not for what I do, but despite what I am not.

That’s the cliff edge. That’s the work I prescribe but haven’t yet managed myself.

Exposure by Increment

The day’s first act felt minor – sending Maggie a message confirming I’d sit for the oral history interview, not conduct it. Subject, not curator. A shift in pronoun that required pressing send before my narrative instincts could rewrite the offer into something safer.

Then the community centre, where I’d circled the Tuesday watercolour class for months like someone studying a map of a country they’ll never visit. I rang and asked, with manufactured calm, whether beginners were tolerated and whether the wrong brushes mattered. The registrar laughed – kindly, without condescension – and said most of us arrive poorly equipped.

I wrote my name on the list before I could think myself out of it. Fifty-eight years old, accepting the mild humiliation of the word beginner. This is exposure therapy by other means: consenting to be a novice on purpose, in public, without the protective frame of expertise.

Harbour Counsel

Father Walsh met me at the harbour for our walk, mizzle turning the masts to pencil sketches. He asked, in that way of his that isn’t conversational filler, what the risk would cost.

“Control,” I said.

He nodded and left silence where platitudes might have gone – the kind of spacious quiet that lets weary truths breathe. We watched a gull bully a crab pot and agreed that most courage looks like repetition, until one day repetition becomes invitation.

Later, at Marcus’s, I found him again: the man from four Tuesdays ago, the one with careful hands and a voice that doesn’t fill rooms but settles into them. We’d spoken once about chamber music, a conversation that ended courteously and went nowhere.

Today I didn’t discuss the weather. I said, “I heard the quartet is playing Bartók on Thursday. I was wondering if you still planned to go.”

The sentence landed between us like a coin on a saucer – small, metallic, irrevocable.

He smiled, surprised but not displeased, and said, “I do, yes. Would you sit with me?”

The old instinct rose: make a tasteful exit, promise “I’ll see,” vanish into safety. Instead I said, “I’d like that.” Three words. The sentence trembled. It held.

The Consulting Room as Mirror

In session, I caught myself doing what I do: shepherding others across thresholds I avoid.

The young woman who’s learning, millimetre by millimetre, to hold a gaze. Michael – my brother, though I don’t name that in these entries – the retired engineer trying to let afternoons be undecided. I offered my usual line: “Rest isn’t earned; it’s required.”

Then I added, more quietly, “Nor is intimacy a performance; it’s a practice.”

I wrote it down afterwards so I couldn’t wriggle free of my own prescription.

Between appointments I resisted the habitual impulse to fill metabolising gaps with emails – that efficient flight from feeling. I sat in the Victorian light, watched the harbour’s low chop, and let my nervous system argue with itself. The jaw unclenched first. Then the shoulders remembered down.

The body keeps a more honest calendar than the diary.

Small Vows

At lunch I wrote to Jonathan – my residency friend, the one who supervises my life as deftly as he once supervised my clinical notes – and named the specific risk: “I’m saying yes to something that could go nowhere and will still be worth it.”

His reply came swiftly: “Good – let some things go nowhere; that’s where we find here.”

I saved it beside Helen’s old letters, in the file I’ve titled Proof.

I stopped at Riverfront Books and asked Dan to set aside a beginner’s watercolour kit, accepting the word beginner again, this time as commitment rather than confession. He tucked in a tin of half-pans “for field studies,” as if he knew the Delaware would demand to be painted the moment I learned how to admit sky onto paper.

Late afternoon brought the Historical Society and Maggie’s recorder, photographs of the shipyard years spread across the table like evidence. For once, I didn’t straighten the narrative for public consumption. I said, “Ask me about the bits I avoid,” and she, bless her, did.

We spoke about competence as armour, about mothers who leapt and daughters who measure, about how being woven into a place can shelter and conceal in equal measure. When it ended, I felt wrung out and properly present.

On the way home I stopped at Elena’s for tomatoes and found Tom outside, hip bothering him more now, stride adapted with the kind of dignity you only win by not making a fuss. He noticed the paper bag of brushes peeking past the flowers.

“Trying your hand?” he asked.

“Trying my nerve,” I answered.

“Same muscles,” he said, and tipped his cap.

Evening Promises

I stood at the office window at dusk – October gold doing its vanishing act – and made three modest vows: show up to class, show up to Bartók, show up to myself without rehearsing first.

No oaths about outcomes. Just attendance. The harbour has taught me the religion of tides: courage as returning.

Before bed I booked the Québec hotel I’ve been flirting with in my browser for a year – two nights, single room, view of the Saint Lawrence if the clerk is feeling merciful. It is both too much and exactly enough. I pressed confirm and did not throw up.

Progress, by the teaspoon.

The Architecture of Risk

The biggest risk isn’t a cliff but a corridor – many doors, each marked Just this next thing.

Sit in the interview as a person, not a practitioner. Take the class with wrong brushes and the right humility. Say yes to music with someone who might become a someone. Book a room where no one knows my name.

These risks are ordinary, which is precisely why they terrify – and precisely how they’ll heal what accomplishment could not.

Tomorrow will ask its ordinary price. I intend to pay in attention, not avoidance – to risk being seen and, in the seeing, to be met where credentials can’t follow.

The harbour keeps its own counsel. I’m learning to do the same, only louder where it counts.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.