A Lie

Fourth grade, just starting to notice boys as something more than objects to be avoided, and I get a note.

“You’re pretty. If you want to go out with me, raise your hand at 2:01.”

I looked around the room. Could it really be possible? Someone thought I, still the new kid even after a year and the crybaby, was pretty enough? Nice enough? Smart enough?

I showed it to the other girls. Not all friends, but the closest I had.

“Raise your hand,” they said at recess, and again as the clock struck 2. “Raise your hand.”

I caught the just-about titter before I put my hand in the air, but not before my heart broke. He didn’t think I was pretty enough, but they thought I was dumb enough. No one liked my hair or my eyes, they just wanted to see if I’d fall, if they could get me, again.
My vigilance saved me from humiliation, but not from pain.

That’s one of the problems with lies: they hurt.

Sometimes the pain is pins stuck into deep places, like it was for me that day. Other times, it ebbs out so slowly that we miss it unless we look at things from just the right angle.

I think there’s a lie around that’s causing pain like that, pain that’s not even pain until we touch it. Pain many of us get so used to that we don’t even notice the things we’re doing to fill up the holes it leaves behind.

The lie? That truly living means our days are filled with adventure, excitement, and meaning we create. That if we do anything other than follow our dreams / travel around the world / join a cause, we’re only putting in time. Or wasting our time.

It’s not that making our dreams come true and doing exciting things is wrong. It’s not. But most of us don’t have the money, time, or energy to live in those places all the time.

In fact, if we did, we’d wear out, flame out, or burn out.

But the lie tells us we must live this way, or we’ve failed. We’ll get to the end of things and wish we’d chosen differently, wish we’d made our days our own instead of letting them come and go, ebb and flow, bringing what they bring.

The lie ignores the fact that a day is a gift. Each day is a gift. Life itself is a gift, and not just when we feel like we’re really living.

So I propose the following thoughts, to counteract the lie and bring some healing to the pain: 

If the now is as much of a gift as the not yet, maybe our task is different than what we’ve learned it to be.

Maybe instead of creating experience and meaning, we’ll find the meaning of each day as we live it, whatever it brings.

Maybe life is less about how much we fit in and more about how open our hands are to receive.

Maybe these days we’re given are holy places, brimming with more than we’ve let ourselves see.

If the little girl who got that note can learn to look into eyes that say, “I love you,” and trust him, then healing is possible. We can learn to meet each day, no matter what it holds, and say, “These? These are sacred days.”