The Good News About Hard Times
My Mum believed in calling hard stuff what it was. Name the unwelcome guest at the table, she’d insist. Your energy is finite, don’t waste any pretending what’s happening isn’t happening.
"The weight of these sad times we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” was Shakespeare’s guidance in King Lear.
Then let’s say it plain: there’s much that’s ruthless and cruel, that can rattle you down to the bone, make you question if we’ll find our way out of these dark woods.
Calling hard stuff for what it is doesn’t change the hard stuff. But it can change our relationship to it. We aren’t lying to ourselves about how things are; we are looking with clear eyes at life as it is. “This is not where we want to be, and it is where we are,” has become a well-worn refrain of mine.
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If you have walked alongside a beloved as their time winds down, confronted your own mortality, sat at the bedside of someone you can’t imagine life without, there is much you don’t get worked up about that you once did. You have no spare energy to give.
So the good news about hard times is that they can lay bare what really matters to us. And what society tells us to value - how others think of us, keeping up with the Joneses, hitting career or life benchmarks by a certain age - can lose some of its hold on us.
I’ve long believed that a good day is not one where the sun shines on terrific headlines, every traffic light is green, and the wind is at my back. But one where I spend my time in service of my values.
Here’s another way to put it: this season we find ourselves in can bring into sharper focus what we love. Which opens the door for us to spend our time as a reflection of what we love, instead of a reflection of what we fear. And hard times occupied by love can’t help but soften up a bit.