Emergence

Ah, emergence. This is my favorite word. I love it because it’s a bubbling up to the surface, a process of revealing something once concealed.

Not to be confused with emergency—no one likes those. But emergence and emergency come from the same Latin root. Emergence went the way of rising up, and coming to light, while emergency took the short, quick road to a sudden, unforeseen event.

They’re related in origin, and yet one is so lovely while the other one can be a total disaster. (Not unlike family members, right?)

With an emergence, we can sit back and watch something come into being. With an emergency, we can make plans for cleaning up the mess when everything goes horribly wrong. No one wants an emergency, but like it or not, they do have a way of knocking everything into perspective. There’s no more waffling over a decision or refusing to make a move.

I remember traveling years ago; this is not a story about an emergency, by the way. We’ve been through our share of those. This is a story about changing perspective. I was traveling with friends and we managed to get on a plane, then into a car on the Autobahn, and then onto a train, all within about a 24-hour period. It was a lot of quick thinking and decision-making while lugging a hefty suitcase, and getting more and more sleep deprived, and it was enough movement in a short enough time that I got vertigo. My friend Johanna felt it, too.

For the next five days, Johanna and I felt like we were moving when we were sitting still, and we felt like we were tilting to the left as we walked. Our whole world had turned into a funhouse experiment. It was unnerving, dizzying, disorienting, and, as I got used to it—because it’s amazing what you can get used to—I almost started to like it. Then, just as quickly as it started, it stopped, and it stopped for Johanna, too. Despite this, she and I continued to stumble and bump into walls for the next couple of hours. It turns out, we’d learned to compensate for the changes and now we had to compensate back to “normal.” Interestingly enough, it was easier for us to get used to the symptoms than it was to switch back to reality.

So when the day comes that we’re no longer sitting back and waiting for the next emergence to reveal itself in our lives, when we’re instead suddenly thrown into the thick of things, adrenaline rushing, making decisions by the seat of our pants, here’s to knowing that no matter how we wind up on the other side of that next emergency, we will eventually get there. We’ll be different, but we’ll emerge nonetheless.