Things don’t always work out. Picnics get cancelled. You lose your glasses. The trash bag breaks. Heart breaks. Best laid plans in the face of the chuckling gods and all that. These small disappointments are sewn into the work of being alive. But i’ve come to believe that the business of being human is not about winning some sort of happiness game where all is well, finally. The very nature of our finite lives has made that a fool’s errand from the start. 

Don’t worry, I’m not about to declare some grandiose meaning of life. I think the beauty of that unanswerable question is that it is different for every one, and different from moment to moment for each. 

Our wildly large brains and the seemingly endless capacity of our hearts, makes life about an uncountable amount of things all at once. Sometimes, often times, it isn’t even happiness or joy that’s going to satiate our hungry little selves. Sometimes, often times, we find the solemn, the somber, to be the thing we need to explore. And this is because these things are not separate. I’m not saying that you can’t experience joy without pain. I’m certainly not saying that the more suffering you endure the more capable you are to embrace happiness when it shows up. But I AM saying that these two things are inextricable from each other. In order to open your windows wide enough to feel the breeze of the perfectly cool summer day, you’re also welcoming the harsh rain that starts while you’ve drifted off into the afternoon nap. 

Two things (many things actually) can be happening all at once. And in these moments of despair we can know that it was a desire to explore the magnificent range of our hearts that brought them to our door. The acceptance of this tumult can be a sort of reverence for our own willingness to be vulnerable enough to feel the full capacity of our small and complicated and deeply precious time here.