There is a particular silence that comes when you turn off a screen you have been hiding behind. It is not peaceful. The room is suddenly very large, and something that had been waiting all evening steps forward into the space the noise used to fill. An ache. A hole, if you want the more honest word — the one I caught myself typing, by accident, as whole.

For a long time I would do anything not to meet it. That is what the dramas were: a wall of warm light I could put between myself and the hole. And when I finally admitted I would have to take the wall down, my first fear was not the taking-down. It was this: what if I sit with it and it does not fade? What if it has no bottom?

I want to write carefully here, because this is the place most advice gets it wrong. People will tell you to sit with your feelings as though sitting were the whole cure, as though the ache were a guest who leaves once properly greeted. Sometimes it is. Often it is not. I have sat with this ache for twenty-five years, in silence, on cushions, on long walks, and I still broke and ran to a screen. So let me not pretend the sitting is simple. Let me instead tell you what I now think the sitting actually is.

Twenty-six centuries ago the Buddha described a person struck by an arrow. There is the pain of the arrow — sharp, real, not optional. And then, he said, most of us do a second thing: we shoot ourselves with a second arrow. The grief about the grief. The fear of the fear. The frantic reaching for anything that will make the first arrow stop. He called the untrained person the one struck by two darts. The trained person feels the first and does not fire the second.

That distinction reorganized everything for me. The hole — the first arrow — may be permanent. It may genuinely have no bottom; some of us carry a wound whose origin we will never fully find. But almost all of the unbearableness, the part that makes it feel like an abyss, is the second arrow — the running, the panic, the years of effort spent not-feeling. The running is what magnifies the hole into something monstrous. Turning to face it, oddly, is what begins to make it bearable. Not smaller, necessarily. Bearable.

Rumi said it with a kinder image. He calls a human being a guest house, and every morning a new arrival — a joy, a depression, a meanness — and his instruction is shocking the first time you read it: welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. Even the dark thought, the shame, the sorrow that sweeps your house empty of its furniture. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. You do not have to love the ache. You only have to stop barricading the door against it as though its arrival were proof that something has gone wrong.

And then there is Rilke, who I keep near me like a stone in a pocket. Perhaps, he wrote to a young man who was afraid of his own sadness, all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us. The thing in the large quiet room is not a monster hunting me. It may be the most helpless part of me, finally able to come close because the noise has stopped.

The philosopher Eugene Gendlin spent his life studying what actually changes people in therapy, and found it was rarely the insight. It was a bodily act he called focusing — turning toward the murky, unclear edge of a feeling and simply keeping it company, without rushing to name or fix it. Staying beside it. The word matters. Not inside it, drowning. Not above it, analyzing. Beside it, the way you would sit beside someone who is crying, not to stop them, just so they are not alone.

This is the sentence I came to, the one my own body recognized when I finally said it:

A felt ache you can sit beside is a completely different creature from a fled ache that runs your nights. One is suffering. The other is depth.

The fled ache makes you exhausted, secretive, and shallow — always one screen ahead of yourself. The felt ache, kept company over years, becomes the deep water the rest of your life draws from. It becomes the thing other people sense in you and cannot name. It becomes, if you are a person who makes things, the source you make from.

I will say the hard part plainly, because I needed someone to say it to me: it may not fade. You may carry it your whole life. The mystics did. The artists did. The goal was never the perfect anesthetic that finally ends the ache — that is the addict’s dream, and I have chased it down enough dark hallways to know it ends in exhaustion. The goal is to change your relationship to the ache: from something you flee to something you companion.

That is not a downgrade from the life you wanted. For someone built like me, it may be the only door into the depth I kept admiring from across a screen.

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The second of five essays in Keep the Fire Moving. Next: why some of us cannot do “a little,” and what the fire that drives the running is actually for.