I try not to apologize for things unnecessarily, but this morning I found myself doing just that. “I’m sorry I don’t sound cheery,” I said to a friend I’d run into on the train. Our three-stop catch up gave us just enough time to share small snippets of life with one another. Playing the conversation back to myself, I had realized that most of my reports were neutral or negative. I felt guilty.
What is it in me that demands cheeriness? What is it that reviews a recent conversation and deems it under-optimistic? What conditioning do I have that requires me to apply a sheen of cheer to what was an honest conversation with a kind friend?
In seasons of life that feel difficult or challenging, I often find myself wishing for a short vacation. If I could go to the land of optimism, sit by the ocean and have a fruity cocktail, then perhaps I’d come back to the land of ordinary life with renewed energy.
Life doesn’t always offer fruity cocktails. It offers laundry. It offers viruses and stress, arguments and debt, confusion and loneliness. Our time is spent checking off the next to-do, answering the next email, filling the car with gas, taking out the trash, and making dinner.
I’m resisting my tendency to apply the sheen of convenient sentimentalism on this post. Instead, I’m offering myself the opportunity to take up space here, in difficulty, in transition, in learning and care. I trying to see the doldrums and the drag and the slogging as a slow, credible place of learning. I am trying not to demand cheeriness, but to offer authenticity. To be real in this real life, to offer truth. To offer myself.