Gradually, over the years, a parallel life of undone things builds up. The unresolved has a lingering force and it follows us. Because this happens in the unconscious and unknown regions of our hearts, we rarely notice its effect.*
(John O’Donohue)

John O’Donohue closes his book of blessings To Bless the Space Between Us with these haunting words. I wonder, though we may have left certain things undone, perhaps we can yet redeem our days?

We will need to turn our attention to the undone, as painful as this is. Sometimes we will find hovering on the edges of our senses and sometimes it is an obstacle fully in front of us:

The undone continues to live near us; sometimes it is more powerful than what we have actually completed. What is finished lets us go free; it becomes truly part of us and is integrates and woven into memory.*

Maybe the undone things have gone. Perhaps the hope is found in identifying new things, things that naturally emerge from who we are and invite us to act. O’Donohue is focusing on the reframing power of a blessing, and that perhaps is a good word to use for what we are able to do with what remains of of our days:

What remains unfinished continues to dwell in that still hungry and unformed part of the heart that could not realise itself and grow free; these gaps in our integrity stay open and hungry. This is one of the neglected areas that can be reframed by a blessing.*

You are full of talents and hopes and values – when articulated these become the heavy-laden-with-possibility elements of an engrossing story. One that is not finished but is being written each and every day.

We may even find the undone becomes done in a different way.

(*From John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us.)