The Center Cannot Hold. But We Do.
A meditation on collapse, continuity, and the center that survives what falls apart (Yeats was right about the systems of the world, but not about us).
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
—W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
When Yeats penned his oft-quoted poem—mused upon by everyone from Joan Didion to Stephen King to Moby to A.J. Soprano—the First World War had only just ended, the Russian Revolution still unfolding. The Spanish Influenza pandemic gripped Europe, with even his pregnant wife falling ill. Tensions were climbing in Yeats’s native Ireland, a country teetering on the edge of the War of Independence.
Times, they were a little iffy, no?
Sound familiar?
Across the globe, the old guard was crumbling—colonial empires cracking, resistance movements rising. Victorian ideals dissolved into modernist chaos. Narratives collapsed under the weight of their own certainty. The prevailing zeitgeist of progress, power, and peace was disintegrating in real time.
As one article put it, “Events conspired to put Yeats in an apocalyptic frame of mind.”
Gee whiz, you think?
Yeats was right. The center cannot hold.
Systems crumble. Institutions cease to exist. The stock market collapses. Power structures implode. Absolute, irrefutable truths (the kind we’d stake our lives and hearts on) are proven false. Oligarchs come into favor and rise to power only to fall spectacularly. Entrenched ideologies are rejected en masse. The matrix glitches and illusions become visible to the naked eye. We hunt and hurt and maim and bomb and kill as if we ourselves are not just as fallible, just as human, as those we’ve othered.
The center cannot hold the same shape or form. When we attempt to shore it up, to force it into stasis, the foundations begin to quake. The center won’t keep answering to the same language, won’t keep telling the same story, won’t hold steady in who it names hero or villain. The center is not stagnant, it is not dependable, and it cannot be relied on to last. Try to force the matter, and the fractures get wider. Try to cling to the past, and the future rushes in tsunami style.
What we trust to hold us steady is almost always more fragile than it appears.
The center cannot hold.
History sets a pretty solid precedent, science backs it up: entropy is inevitable.
We all tend toward our most undone, in the end.
None of it is ever forever, even when we imagine—or hope, or pray, or plead to gods we do or don’t believe in—that this time it just might be.
No, that center—the one that exists out there—cannot hold. Not even when we try, with all our might, to hold it.
But the Center?
I mean the capital-C Center. The in-here center. The one nestled behind your ribcage or tucked into the core of your solar plexus. The one as familiar as your own soul.
The one thick as blood pulse and soft as the memory of your grandmother’s voice.
The center you’ve wrapped in warm blankets and sung to sleep on the nights you didn’t think you’d survive—only to wake and witness the birth of a new day, disbelief and all.
Fuck yes, that one holds.
It might not look like it.
It damn sure doesn’t always feel like it.
But the center holds.
Because the center—the real center—is in us.
We evolve, even when we don’t want to.
We hold steady while the earth shakes.
We build storm shelters to keep the cyclones out.
We lose our way. We stumble in the desert.
We get mixed up in the wackiest shit, forget to take our vitamins, don’t get near enough sleep, binge both seasons of Severance in a single night instead of going to the gym, or calling our mother, or kissing our girlfriend.
We twist ourselves into pretzels trying to convince people to love us when they are determined to go.
We twist ourselves into even tighter pretzels, trying to keep ourselves in places we were never meant to stay.
And still, we hold.
The out-there center collapses into ruin around us—systems, stories, structures turned to ashes and dust.
And somehow, we keep holding.
God damn little miracle machines, every last one.
Even right now. Post-truth. Climate grief. AI-generated everything. Deep fakes. Revenge Porn. The girls are fighting. Gaza still burns and burns. Reality splinters and fractures into a million pixels. The matrix is glitching once again, and this time we can see it all.
No, that center—the one Yeats was talking about, the center that concerns itself with nations, government, borders, and systems—is not holding.
That center cannot hold.
That center was never meant to hold. But we are.
We are what holds, when everything else collapses.
We shift. We stretch. We carry the weight.
We evolve, and change, and adjust, and grow, and rebuild.
And we hold, y’all. We hold. And we do it beautifully.
It’s our center—shaped by the pressure, altered by the heat, dense with knowing—that holds.
Always has, always will.
We hold ourselves, and we hold each other.
And we do our utmost to hold all those tangled in the implosion—the inevitable collapse that follows when that out-there center finally gives up the ghost.
We link arms, patch together daisy chains of care, resistance, memory, and mercy. We become the scaffolding. We embody the shelter. We are the foundation.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough to begin again.
Coming soon:
This essay is the introduction to What Holds—a poetic, intimate weekly roundup, a simple practice of gathering what steadies me and sharing it here with you.
I intend for What Holds to be a counterspell to the disintegration. It will include small glimpses of beauty, clarity, and resilience that have found me—fragments that help my center hold, and moments where I witness others holding theirs. Reminders that even when the center cannot hold out there, we can still hold it here, together.
This is how I trace my way back to the center.
How I reclaim steadiness, moment by moment.
This is how my center holds.
Stay tuned for the first issue, coming soon. And in the mean time, please share, what has been holding you?
Every paid subscription helps me rebuild. In this season of transition after a federal layoff, your support means more than ever. Each subscriber is a tangible reminder that the work—and the words—still matter. Thank you for being part of what holds.
I read this before seeing it was from you. Of course it is. The depth. The truth. I love you. Thank you 🙏🏼
Thank you so much for this beautiful reminder. Just what my heart needed today.
How I hold my center is by beginning my day early in the morning on the patio in my garden, watching the hummingbirds bathe in the birdbath, hot tea in hand. I read the daily lesson from A Course in Miracles, meditating on the message and writing out my gratitudes. My writing starts with Thank you for this new day and the miracles that occur today, and write out all my fears and concerns, giving them over for clarity and guidance. I then bring that love back into the house, gently waken my sleeping household and helping them begin their day feeling loved and safe.