What Makes Me Feel Optimistic In A World Full Of Bad News

If you read my blog you know I’m capable of catastrophic Irish morbidity.

Case in point. When my daughters strike an aloof attitude toward me as I leave the house, I have to muzzle myself from saying:
 
“You should hug me goodbye in case I’m run over by an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage on Pico Blvd. and die.
 
“Then you’ll wish you’d given your old mother just one last kiss. And rue the day you didn’t tell her she was the singularly most important person in your young, now-orphaned lives you little shits.”
 
I might have actually said it once. Maybe twice.
 
So the other night — as we were flying, cramped with no champagne or movie screens in economy on the godforsaken, shmutzy, sub-marginal American Airlines where we have our miles — I set aside my certainty we were all going to plummet into the Atlantic Ocean to our watery deaths and looked out of the window thinking, “Look what humans did!”

Someone(s) much smarter than me figured out how to get a bunch of dead weight all the way up in the air and keep it there as it is jet-propelled halfway across the globe.

That got me to thinking about all of the other things humans have figured out.

• Roads.
• Suspension bridges.
• Checks and Balances.
• The automobile.
• Ivy League Colleges.
• Gelato.
• And let us not forget … the Bumpy Bunny vibrator.

I was suddenly infused with this overwhelming sense of optimism and hope.

Sometimes it seems as if we humans are destroying ourselves as fast as we can, but mostly I’m amazed by how we’ve evolved from Neanderthalls to make room in our lives for more than mere animal survival.

That we contemplate and pursue supercilious (yet vital) things such as Beauty and Grace.

I see those things in my home on a constant basis.

• The constellation of freckles on Bridget’s face.
• The surprise of hearing Clare play her pianoforte with an inimitable musicality.
• My kitty Marilyn Monroe’s blatant wantoness as she flips on her back to have her belly rubbed.
• Henry’s continuing love for me despite my utter lack of discretion and persistent eau d’ bossiness.

Being as happy as I mostly am can be terrifying, and I often wait for the other shoe to drop. For some rogue malevolent force to snatch it all away.

Last month, I read an astonishing article in Vogue magazine written by Madonna Badger, a woman who lost both of her parents and all three of her children to fire in one night.

She ended up in a psyche ward and on suicide watch, but very slowly, over the course of two years, she’s coming out of her grief and choosing to rebuild her life.

She writes about a pivotal moment, when helping a friend sort through antiques in her warehouse, that brought her perspective and healing:

“… as I spent day upon day going through box upon box looking for beautiful objects, two things happened.
 
“One, I had to stay in the present moment. It’s hard to go too far down one road or another when you’re using your hands and your eyes and your brain so intently.
 
“The second thing was that as we found old photographs, I was forced to reckon with loss, with transience.
 
“I came to understand and be at peace with the notion that the people in the pictures I was looking at were all gone now—that the little girl in 1905 who owned the doll I was holding in my hands was dead; that all this stuff was really just the ephemera that gets left behind. There was really no judgment about it.”

I take this to mean that Badger realized, on the vast timeline of humanity, she would be here only a short time longer than her children and parents and that their time on earth was no less meaningful than hers.

That they had, indeed, existed.

This woman’s resilience, strength, grace and humility make me feel so optimistic, despite the tragedy that brought it forth.

So, I leave you with a few of the beautiful things I’ve seen recently and a wish that you’ll be struck by Beauty today.

Whether it be the consistency of our mail delivery system.

• Or the way your neighbor’s yellow lab muzzles the palm of your hand with his warm snout.
• Or how your lover smells of lavender and calendula.
• Or the delicious practice of kissing your child’s still-round baby cheeks. 

Who knows what will strike you. There are so many beautiful things.

What makes you happy?