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Dear Friends,
As much as we would love for every January to “understand the assignment” and provide the ideal conditions for our renewed commitment to ourselves and our passions, it so rarely works that way. The start of 2025 has been especially, painfully fraught. So, I thought that, on this Sunday, as I stare out of frozen windows in the midwest, I would give myself—and us—a faith boost, revisiting the question I explored last year thanks to Amy Hempel: “How do we know that what happens to us isn’t good?”
It’s a paraphrase of the brilliant last line of this short story by Amy Hempel:
This story captures our instinct to label experiences as good or bad, helpful or harmful, for us or against us. Without the author “telling” us what to think, she illustrates the quandary—and shows us a way out.
How do we know that what happens to us isn’t good? We don’t. And that not-knowing, that question, is the very sort that might sustain us in our darkest moments.
Here’s a Taoist parable, as retold by Alan Watts, that illustrates a similar lesson:
There was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. His neighbors came around to commiserate and said, “We are so sorry your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day, the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening, everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
You get the idea.
Labeling events and feelings gives us the illusion of control, and that illusion is the mind’s directive, what it seeks above all else. The brain wants familiarity and comfort, even if what’s familiar is uncomfortable. If it’s known, it’s good. The brain is not wired to nudge you towards executing your largest vision and finding your deepest fulfillment and contentment. It is wired to keep you safe. It wants you to stay inside the cave.
But, if we can suspend our judgement, putting a bit of space between the plot of our lives and our judgmental commentary, something miraculous happens. We begin to see opportunities instead of dead ends. We steady ourselves on even the most diffused hope or curiosity instead of bearing the weight of our bitter objections.
I think so often of the end of D.H. Lawrence’s “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through”:
What if it’s not someone who wants to do us harm? What if that thing that weighs on you at this very moment will prove to be the key to future joy, or a renewed version of your life?
Nothing in our culture promotes this kind of thinking, but we gain little by privileging negativity, by expecting a half-empty glass to further drain itself. The fact is that you are the only person listening to the story you tell about the events and feelings in your own life. You are listening to everything you think, and you have a body that reacts to that story. So, what if it’s not somebody who wants to do us harm, but three strange angels knocking?
Join me in this faith boost, please: share a tough moment in your life that turned out to be an unexpected blessings. Moments when “bad” proved to be “good.” I want to read them ALL, and I hope, if you’re feeling stuck or defeated today, that you will read these stories, too. That you will know this post is, in some small way, for you—the sun is always waiting for you above dense fog and cloud.
With great fondness, and every good wish,
xM
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In 2021 our family couldn't afford to take a summer vacation. Gas prices were too high, covid scare still lingering. But then in September our house sprung a leak. The pipes hidden in the concrete slab started bubbling water up under the floorboards in the hall. We called in a contractor and they discovered also that the drainpipe to the tub had corroded away and water had been standing in a pool under the tub for a long time and there was mold in the walls of the bathroom and our bedroom. And also the roof had been leaking and there was mold in the walls of my children's rooms.
We had to evacuate our house. Pile almost all our possessions into a POD (thanks so much to all the scouts and homeschooling families who came to help us pack all our stuff!) while the contractors flood-cut the walls and ripped up the wall to wall carpeting and the faux-wooden floors. (The old nasty carpets we'd been dreaming of pulling up, but getting everyone and everything out of the house was too big a pain.)
Our insurance wanted to put us up in a hotel, two two-room suites for seven people for an indefinite period of time; but we did some research and found a rental house that cost less than the hotel and would give us much more room to spread out, plus a full kitchen. Amazingly our insurance agreed to pay for the VRBO. Then, while we waited for the insurance to approve the funding for a rental, a friend reached out and offered us his family's vacation home for two weeks. On Cape Cod. So we got our vacation after all. September is a little cool, but we waded along the beach, saw seals and gathered shells, and tried not to think about the house.
Then we moved to the VRBO. Which was again, just blocks from the beach, this time in Plymouth. We spent all of October and most of November in a beach house, walking on the beach most days. We had adventures including weathering a storm with hurricane-force winds.
If our house hadn't flooded, we'd never have been able to afford two months of living at the beach. It was awful and inconvenient at times, but it was also magnificent. Now tell me was the flood bad or good? We ended up with all new floors and new walls, all freshly painted. We had a long vacation in places we could never have given our kids. We just had to undergo some trauma and massive disruption in order to get there.
I was in my second last semester of my master's program in Boston, far away from my family in small town Ontario. i was so elated to be approaching the finish line, my vision of the future was a blurry, shaking kaleidoscope of possibility. Then the unthinkable happened- I was visa non-compliant due to a fluke in the online self-service system. The international advisor didn't catch the dropped course in time, the school had already sent it's reports to ICE. Trump had just passed a new covid measure that all foreign students who were only taking online courses had to return to their home country, and they also couldn't get new visas if theirs was terminated. They had to terminate my visa. I had 21 days to leave. I had to break a new lease I had just signed, and give away everything I had spent the past three years collecting. Anything that couldn't fit into my 2 suitcases I had to leave behind. I was forced to take a 6-month leave of absence until in-person classes resumed. I was devastated. I felt like such a failure to be falling behind compared to my friends, who'd be graduating next semester. I felt I was leaving behind a life that I had spent so much time carefully curating, I felt I was travelling back in time- to go back to Canada, back to my childhood home, could only feel like a cruel regression. I ended up flying home on Jan 6th 2021- the day of the insurrection. I remember feeling that the day really couldn't get any worse.
Inevitably, after having spent the summer back at my family home, I returned to Boston to finish my degree. Not even 2 weeks after coming back, both of my parents were diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. I had to return home again to take care of them until their passing. My mom died 2 weeks after I returned home, and my father died 3 months after her. That 6 month period where I was forced to leave the country, that I thought had meant certain doom, was actually the last 6 months I spent with my parents when they were healthy. Pure, unfettered, joyous, rampant bliss. I was able to cook with my dad, go on trips with them, lounge by the pool, spend lazy summer days with them chatting and laughing and loving. Now, I would not give those 6 months up for anything. If I had remained in Boston and graduated 'on time', the next I would have seen my parents, they would already appear sick and dying, the chemo coursing through their bodies. Those 6 months are holy to me. A lasting memory. I can still hear my dad laughing at the barbeque, my mom wearing her crochet sunhat, waiting for whatever tasty food my dad was cooking. I was witness to much life in that small period.