It’s Saturday and it’s an inevitably gloomy and rainy winter morning here in Oregon. How I thoroughly enjoy dreary days like this sometimes. I love any excuse to not leave my house all day. Even the thought of cozying up to a warm fire next to my dog with a blanket, a book, and a hot cup of coffee has me instantly feeling happy. Other days, I reminisce my former life in San Diego: the soft sand beneath my feet, the sound of the Pacific Ocean waves crashing ashore, and the warm SoCal sun kissing my skin. As the rain begins to pelt harder against my bedroom window, the saying ‘you can’t appreciate the sun without the rain’ flashes in my mind and I am quickly jolted into reality– I am no longer in San Diego.
I sit on my messy unmade bed, and find myself wondering why bad things happen to good people? Like pain, diseases, hate, cruelty, or miserable people entering your life like a Category 5 Hurricane, causing nothing but destruction and a tough lesson.
A few months back, I found myself subject to collateral damage from two individuals. Even though their wreckage left me in a brief period of distress, I still found myself questioning how and why people end up like this. Is someone born this way? Is it from childhood? Trauma? Drugs/Alcohol? I tend to overthink on occasion as it usually provides me with a some type of understanding or a sense of closure. Unfortunately, I can’t always overthink my way into understanding and in this case, I didn’t receive the answers I wanted. Sometimes the answer is simple: we may never fully know why bad things happen.
What I do know is that there is a lot of evil on this earth and sadly, it seems to only be getting worse. One of the many reasons why I left the big city of San Diego and moved back to Oregon was it provided me with the small town comfort and the known familiarity of home. But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times that the darkness of this world makes me want to cripple in a ball and stay hidden inside my house, protected from the crazy and harm ‘out there’.
As children, it’s ingrained in us from a young age that the answer to our happiness is found in someone else. Thanks to story books and Disney movies, we are made to believe that our happily ever looks like a knight in shining armor riding in on his white horse to save the princess, the stereotypical and helpless damsel in distress. But this isn’t real. It’s a false reality, and a dangerous one at that, to believe that the fate of our happiness is held in the hands of someone else.
Now that I am an adult, life and loss has taught me that the real beauty of life is in its shades of light and dark, grief and healing, happiness and sadness, laughter and tears. Just like the sun isn’t appreciated without the rain, the light isn’t appreciated without the darkness.
We can learn to navigate these ever-changing contrasts in life, by looking for the happy in the right now. Sometimes it’s the glimmers of magic in the mundane. The simple joys: like the first sip of coffee in the morning, watching a hummingbird flutter around a flower bed, laughing uncontrollably with your best friend, or simply enjoying a glass of wine on a string lit patio during a warm summer evening.
Living life with the happy right now, means never giving anyone the power to dim my light. Instead, I can live life welcoming everything that shows up, the good and the bad, knowing it’s all a part of my story. It’s definitely a courageous way to live, standing with door to my heart wide open.
But maybe an actual happily ever after, is to exist in a world that you don’t need rescuing from. A place without any illusions, a white horse, or a Prince Charming….
Maybe the real fairy tale, is living a brave, bold, authentic, well-lived life.