oh this is hard

A random photo, both recent and unrelated.  Though, really, don’t hydrangeas meet what is in their path and, with mute implacability, correct their course?  They wind around looking for light, they change color, and they live on.

I am increasingly convinced that the key to happiness and success in this life is the ability to course-correct.  Last weekend, we were in Vermont at a (wonderful) family reunion.  I was putting Grace and Whit to bed in sleeping bags on the floor and Grace was tired and cranky.  She gave me attitude and was pissy, and, exhausted from a long drive and day, I didn’t have the slack to be generous with her.  I snapped back and, with a genuine but short “I love you,” left the room.

About 30 minutes later Matt came down and whispered to me that Grace wanted to see me.  He had gone upstairs to get something and had talked to the still-awake children when he was in our room.  I walked upstairs and crouched by their sleeping bags.  Grace’s face was wet with tears, and Whit looked anxious and somewhat upset.

“Everything okay?” I leaned over Grace and hugged her.  Hiccuping, tearful, she told me she was sorry, she felt bad, and she did not want to go to bed angry.  She wanted to clear the air, she said.  She was sorry and it was the Fourth of July and she did not want to mar it with an argument.

I am not sure I’ve ever hugged her harder.  I owed her an apology, too, and I offered it.  But I thanked her for having the ability to say hey, let’s put that behind us, let’s not hold a grudge, let’s move on.  And I meant it.  We hugged and she went to sleep and I went downstairs and all was well.

I thought about the maturity it took for her to say: I am sorry, let’s let go.  I thought about the days I’ve ruined by attaching to my own failure to concentrate or to my own wounded ego or emotions.  I am sure we’ve all had the experience of something going poorly and of deciding well, hell, it’s all lost.  I’m equally sure that the key to success and to happiness – hell, to life – is in the ability to say: you know what?  That sucked.  I’m doing X or Y badly.  But I’m going to let go of that disappointment, hurt, or dismay, and try to move on with a light heart and an open mind.

This is one of those insights, muted rather than blinding but absolutely essential, that this season of my life has held for me.  Learn how to let go of our failures rather than to let them bring us down and to let go of how we wanted it to be so that we can have it as it is.  Because I don’t want to ruin these days by attaching myself to all the ways that they – and more importantly, I – disappoint me.  If I do that I miss their extraordinary, astonishing brilliance.

Really, I think what I’m saying, is that we need to learn to begin again.  Every day.  Over and over.

Receiving comments and emails from people who read my words here is among my very favorite things in the world.  Once in a while, however, the contents of those messages can make me uneasy.  Sometimes people comment that it seems I have a “perfect” life.  Other times I get adulation about my “perfect” children.  And, lest you think everything I hear is nice, sometimes I get slapped down for being unaware of how good I have it.

The truth is my life is very far from perfect.  My children are far from perfect.  Nothing here is perfect, and I know also that nothing anywhere is perfect.

It’s not all shiny here.  It’s not all wonder and noticing the streak of an airplane across the evening sky and reading poetry aloud.  Those things exist, absolutely: usually every single day.  But there is also shouting, and impatience, and tears.  Years ago I remember someone telling me in a disgruntled tone that they couldn’t possibly be “present” for every moment of their life.  They had a job to do, and dishes to wash, and on and on and on.

I was taken aback by that, and realized I was not communicating what I meant by “being present” clearly enough.  I meant, and mean, it quite literally: being awake, being aware, paying attention.  That does not mean loving everything.  There is plenty that I don’t like in this life of mine.  There is no question that the rooms of my days and of my heart contain mold and dust and there are regrets piling up in the corner.

But there is also so much good.  And I sincerely hope that one thing I am is aware of and grateful for my good fortune.  I don’t enumerate my blessings because I suspect that would be boring, and because it feels like gloating.  But I am incredibly, intensely conscious of how fortunate and privileged I am.

This awareness often adds to my guilt about the melancholy that hovers over me much of the time.  How can I possibly feel sorrow, and these prickly emotions, when I have so very much to be thankful for?  But I do.  And even in the wake of my oft-churning sadness comes a reminder of all the blessings that surround me.  At my saddest and bleakest I still can’t forget all that is beautiful about this life.  In fact I suspect it is precisely my sorrow – which comes directly from my awareness of how fast this life passes – that makes me so aware of loveliness and joy.  They come from the same source, and perhaps are even just sides of a single coin.  This experience, this life: sadness and joy, light and dark, beginnings and ends.  It’s all one.

But back to my point.  And I do have one: my messy, noisy, imperfect life.

Years, ago, I remember Katrina Kenison joking that her husband would “love to be married to the woman who writes the books.”  How this resonated with me, then and still now.  Sometimes when I am rushing everyone out the door in the morning, asserting that we are going to be late, late late!!! (despite the fact that I have literally almost never been late), Matt will turn to me and say: remember, Linds, live every moment.

Bedtime is a good example. I know how sacred bedtime is, how much I love these moments, how desperately I wish I had back all the bedtimes I wished away over the years.   And yet, still, sometimes I trip up and snap at a child who is dallying before bed.  Always, almost immediately, I am overcome with guilt.  I wasted this bedtime, I think.

Daily, I demonstrate in myriad ways my distraction, aggravation, irritation, impatience.  All of those emotions throb through my life, and I know I’m far from alone.  In fact my friend Aidan wrote about this very topic recently.  I know this frustration, this sense of falling down over and over and over again, is human.  I also know others who feel misunderstood, though I’m not familiar with many who have been directly accused of misrepresenting themselves (as I have).  I don’t, and I am not.  This is my life.  It is imperfect, and it is chaotic, and it is full of disappointments and regrets and mistakes, of raised voices and hurt feelings and tears.  It is also full of brilliance and beauty and joy.  I just choose to write about the latter more than the former.  But I assure you: it’s all there.

Have you ever stumbled in the perilous gulf between perception and reality?  Have others ever made assumptions about your life that don’t feel right?  Do you get aggravated, short-tempered, and irritated?

Years ago I described the fleeting nature of time as the black hole around which my whole life circles, the wound that is at the center of all my writing, all my feeling, all my living.  Certainly that seems to be borne out by what it is I write, over and over again.  At the very midpoint of the year, the sunniest, longest days, I find myself battling an encroaching sorrow, an irrefutable sense of farewell.  The proof is in my archives.

The world bursts into riotous bloom, almost as though it is showing off its fecundity.  The days are swollen and beautiful, the air soft, the flowering trees spectacular.  The children gleefully wear shorts to school, the sidewalks are dusted with pollen and petals, and we round the curve of another year.  We start counting down school days, we say goodbye to beloved babysitters who are graduating from college, and I find myself blinking back tears.

Every year, I’m pulled into the whitewater between beginnings and endings that defines this season.  I can barely breathe.

It’s all captured in the event that so many of us attend, year after year, at this time: commencement.  It was my own commencements that marked this season, for years: from grade school, high school, college, graduate school.  And then there was a time when, though I wasn’t personally attending commencements, I felt their presence, sensed the ebb and flow of the school year.  It seems that my spirit and the very blood in my veins will always throb to the cadence of the school year.  And now it is my children who commence, who close a year and begin another, wearing too-long hair and legs, vaguely tentative smiles, and white.

Commencement.  Isn’t this word simply a more elegant way of describing what might be the central preoccupation of my life?  You end and you begin, on the very same day.  You let go of something and while that I-am-falling feeling never goes away, you trust that you’ll land.  And you do, on the doorstep of another beginning, a new phase, the next thing.

No matter how many times I’m caught from the freefall of farewell by a new beginning, though, I still feel the loss.  As much as my head understands that endings are required for them to be beginnings, my heart mourns what is ending.  That a seam of sorrow runs through my every experience is undeniable; it may sound depressing, but I genuinely don’t experience it that way.  It is just part of how I’m wired, and it’s never closer to the surface than right now, as this school year winds down, as we celebrate the beginning that’s wrapped in the end, as we commence.