Between rock and hard place

Recently, my 13-year-old asked me about an idiom I’d never given much thought to. “Mom,” she said, “What does between a rock and a hard place actually mean?”

You know how you learn a new word, or have an idea in your head, and suddenly… it’s everywhere?*

As I was mulling over her question, I kept hearing from friends and clients who were caught in the impossible space between two untenable choices. They were squeezed. Feeling stuck.

Rock, hard place.

And oh, do I relate. While I’ve never had much luck thinking my way out of this place, I have found solace in a Quaker phrase that’s recruited when the path forward is opaque: Way will open.

Way will open invites sitting in the discomfort and listening for a third choice that hasn’t yet revealed itself; not passive waiting so much as active, curious listening. If we can ground that listening in our own felt sense of resource, we begin to notice differently, new possibilities can open.

Not that sitting in uncertainty is a picnic. And there are times when way, stubbornly, doesn’t open. But that too can be instructive. Quaker teacher Parker Palmer writes of an elder who said, “‘In sixty-plus year of living, way has never opened in front of me… But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.’”

If any season knows about opening, it’s spring. If you’ve ever seen a flower growing up through asphalt, you know about the potency of spring’s green spark. Even in these early, muddy days, life breathes into places we might have thought barren. To rocks and hard places, spring whispers: Make way. 

Photo: k mitch hodge via unsplash

*This experience actually has a name! The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion.