Detention Not Retention: When Life Redirects Us

I have this strange childhood memory of discussing the difference between a detention and retention pond with my mother. There was one on our bus route at the edge of my cousin’s neighborhood. This large ditch was a great sledding hill in winter but frequently filled with water in the spring.

Somehow I started calling it a retention pond. (No idea where I even learned the term). My mother, ever the consummate English speaker, corrected me that it was a detention pond. This was because the water was not stored there, she told me, but rather held there temporarily and then slowly released over time.

A lot of us feel like our lives and dreams are on hold right now. I know sometimes I feel like someone put a stopper in my creativity and that nothing sort of smashing the vessel will let it out again. Yet as I bang my soul against the wall, I can’t breakthrough. This is good because I know the end result of the breaking will be a net loss not a gain for my inner muse. But I’m also tired of feeling trapped within myself.

This time, this strange, unprecedented time where the whole world is detained, with our lives ground to a hault is a kind of redirection. Like when water is diverted from a fast-flowing river to water crops. We are not being held in, we are being redirected.

I don’t know what this looks like yet. This month it looks like writing 10,000 words simply because I want to. It looks like weekly dates at home with my husband even if we sometimes get bored of being stuck at home and don’t always feel like it. It looks like showing up for my life day after day even when it feels as though these four walls and this limited existence is all there will ever be.

When I feel as though this virus has stolen my life and caused me to miss an important window I was counting on, I have to remember that I’m not retained, just detained. We use the word detained in almost exclusively negative ways in the English language, but I’m trying to think of it as a positive. This is a waiting room, not a life sentence.

I’m being kept in one space, preventing from doing my life the way I used to, from filling it with the usual busyness. But I am also being let out, a little at a time, into the places I’m supposed to be.

I don’t know where my creativity is meant to flow and where my energy is supposed to be spent yet, but in the meantime, I’ll enjoy the waiting room.