For a good long time (most of the life of this blog), I wrote a lot of super-gooey happy stuff about my spouse and my kids and and my canoeing and my schooling and just about everything else wonderful I could think to write about. Of course there’ve been some hard times, but the balance has been tilted towards the joyful/remarkable/magical.
I think, since my divorce, it’s been a bit harder for me to be so celebratory in this space. It’s true that I still tend to post a lot of happiness here, but I think it’s toned down a bit.
Now it seems a bit harder for me to celebrate my own successes or happinesses, because I fear it would hurt those of my friends who aren’t experiencing those themselves. When there is so much unemployment in my social circle, it’s hard to feel joy in having job security. When a friend’s car is becoming unreliable and they don’t have the resources to fix it, I’m a bit embarrassed by the two new-ish cars in my driveway. When I hear of a health diagnosis that’s the worst-case-scenario rather than the best-one, it’s hard to find pleasure in my own health. When others have lost love in their lives, I don’t want to cause pain by speaking about my own romantic adventures. Perhaps a lot of that sort of feeling comes to a head on a day like today, where half of my friends are celebrating their relationships and the other half are decrying a holiday that’s so overwrought/commercialized/saccharine…
Maybe it’s because I know (all too well) what it’s like to be alone on a special holiday, to face financial uncertainty, to get bad results from the lab tests, and to have news that wounds so deep inside that it takes days for the sun to shine again, that I’m feeling for friends who are experiencing those now. And I wish I could find a way to salve the hurts and difficulties and make things easier again…
On Sunday at sunset I stood at the top of Griffith Park and looked over the whole huge city of Los Angeles and saw more stories and people and places than I could hardly process in a glance. I’m sure there was all kinds of horror and heartbreak out there in the city, but I couldn’t see it in that moment. For me, it was simply beautiful.
But…I wouldn’t know how beautiful it was to be there and to see that if I hadn’t also had days where I couldn’t ambulate well enough to get out of the house, or times when I didn’t have the resources to travel across the city, or moments when I didn’t have a person to share it with walking at my side.
