Oof. Winter really wasn’t a good time for me this year. But, as a beloved auntie was very wont to tell me, this too shall pass.
This phrase used to irk me to no end, and sometimes still does. How dismissive, how cruel an answer! It hurts right now, and telling me it gets better doesn’t help!
The passing of one thing implies the approach of another. That can be a bad thing as much as a good thing. The future lumbers towards us with all the inevitability of a hunting T.rex, and approximately the same amount of teeth.
Learning how to live with regret is suggested to be an important life skill by many. No matter what you do or how you approach your life, there will be experiences or opportunities you cannot partake of. There will be mistakes and failures. Such is the nature of existing, and unavoidable. The trick is to learn how to accept that, so that regret doesn’t strike and drain the joy from the better parts of life.
I would posit that it is just as important to learn how to live with dread. Dread is the sister to regret, one looking to the past and one looking to the future. No matter what we do, time will pass and then roll in like the tide, bringing the unknown. I hate the unknown. It is, as the kids say, Big Yikes.
So what to do? It seems best to focus on the things that are known. The brent geese will fly down from Iceland and form long strings against the pale sky each morning. It’s going to get a little brighter, slowly but surely. The warmth will come back into the air. Tomatoes will be in season again.
There’ll be sadness, and rage, and exhaustion. But maybe there’ll be some happiness, too.
