YEAH — WHY SOMETHING GOOD?

​THAT'S A FAIR QUESTION. ​

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I mean, these are not universally enjoyable times. 

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​​​​​Some things for some people are great and some things for some people are very much not.  Our information streams tend to funnel everything together like a malfunctioning transportation system, skittering us loudly and haphazardly from a new banana bread recipe to a devastating natural disaster to a tense political conflict to a charming dog story.  It can be disorienting at best.  What’s the response?  My own jumbled reaction tends to look like this: I’d bookmark the recipe if it had great reviews, cheerfully forward the dog story to my fellow dog-lovers, and then add the natural disaster and political conflict to my overstuffed, ever-accessible mental notebook of gloom.  My gloomy mental notebook can bulge ominously at times; it’s possible that it’s bulging right now.   

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Additionally — despite a very wide range of perspectives on national/global issues and events — together we can agree that our shared community air is now often bitter and biting; peer into any X-Twitter feed to see for yourself (but actually just don't).  We're all squeezed together in a hot, messy, spiked social and political space.  And on an individual scale — with our children, with our parents, with health and finances and jobs and school — we face serious, heavy stressors that can leave us shaken, depleted, and afraid. 

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So I get what some of you might be thinking: lady, are you tone-deaf with the good news pitch?  Read the room.  

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​​​​​​I know, I know.  But hold that thought for a sec.

 

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GOOD AS A SURVIVAL MECHANISM:​​

By the time people reach their late-fifties, they've usually been through a few things.  ​For our family, the 2010s decade was our misery era, with ongoing spillover into our present days.  Much of it involved overwhelming kid ➡️ teen ➡️ young adult health issues that kept us stuck in a continuously looping game of biological whack-a-mole, with different body parts and systems running off the rails with unpredictable force and direction. 

 

Those 10+ years were filled with hundreds upon hundreds of medical and physical therapy appointments, troubling and life-altering symptoms, injuries, surgeries, a disheartening tangle of medications and side effects, and the weariness that comes from present and future worry.  At the same time, we were navigating the normal highs and lows of teenage and then college life, which were often extremely abnormal in our family's context.  My extraordinarily kind and loving parents both died during this time, too.  It was a long, dark stretch marked by sadness, exhaustion, grief, anxiety, and occasional despair.​​

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It felt like the opposite of good.

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It was — in fact — the opposite of good.​

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But ... I swear to you on my semi-skeptical soul, the combined acts of finding, observing, receiving, perceiving, doing, making, or even giving something good helped save us. 

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It might have been walking with a friend, swapping funny stories in fresh air; it might have been younger sis's SNL-quality dinner table improv sketches; it might have been a gleaming sunny streak during the damp blah of a Seattle winter; it might have been a great book or a line from an old hymn or the "Fire Drill" episode of The Office or new medical research or the rhythmic, reassuring dog snores from our old gal, Goldie.  The good did not have to involve or directly affect us to do its job; we just needed to know that it was there. 

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I tell you: it was fortifying, like some super-charged oxygen that helped us breathe better. 

 

Of course, there were caveats:

     a.)  Objectively, everything bad was still bad (and often still is). 

     b.)  The work required to meet each day's challenges did not abate.  And the fundamental sadness of our situation did not magically lift.

     c.)  Prescriptive platitudes about positive thinking or looking on the bright side or it's all going to be okay were not helpful, and I resented their airily dismissive effect. 

     d.)  Trying to seek all good all the time was not realistic or mental-health-healthy.  I needed my regular Target breakdowns, crying while pushing my red cart under the bright store lights, surrounded by shoppers in all their seemingly* glorious good-health ordinariness. 

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BUT  ... despite these slumpy realities, we learned — over time and with some intention — we could bear our troubles better when we added more light, fun, humor, and good whenever possible.​​​

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A small bit in The Hunger Games books and movies (popular as they were during our misery era) involved tiny parachutes floating down as offerings from sponsors to imperiled contestants in their most dire moments.  Attached to each rare parachute was a saving gift of some sort, like a salve for a terrible wound or some warm food for sustenance.  If I bypassed the entire morally-ick premise of The Hunger Games franchise, I liked picturing those little rescue parachutes, and that is how I came to think of the good things that floated into and around our lives at the time.  The good out there felt like a balm, a cool salve, a slather of thick, goopy protection from whatever ish the next day might bring.

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I’m hoping Here’s One Good Thing can be your very own digital parachute-releaser, dropping one random good thing (plus some miscellaneous extras) into your life every week.  You never know what might be coming your way!  A weekly web-post is unlikely to change whatever is hard and heavy, but I sincerely hope it briefly lightens your load.

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Writing with love and good hope,

Libby