Sometimes you just have to go along for the ride.
courtesy youtube

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life.

I remember my first winter in New York. After the magic of Christmas and the beauty of (freshly-fallen) snow, February brought with it an unexplainable exhaustion and sadness. The days were short, the darkness oppressive, and after a while I finally realized that my depressed state had more to do with the weather than my constant lack of funds. When spring arrived a couple of months later, I felt twenty pounds lighter. Restaurants moved tables outdoors, I packed my down jackets beneath my bed, and the city and I–we came back to life.

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” wrote Shelley, and all it took in the days of my singleness and city-dwelling was that first rise in temperature for me to feel hopeful again, for the darkness to lift. Then again, my biggest concern those days was how to get rid of my hangover so I could watch movies all day on the couch. Oh, and money.

Now I feel the notes of resurrection in spring just as strongly, albeit in a more suburban fashion–blooming dogwoods, growing grass–but I’m also more aware of the price of admission to the season. Gone is the cooperative hair of the cold months. There are more bugs venturing indoors (I just killed an ant on the windowsill. Suck it, PETA). A thick carpet of pollen coats my throat and everything else.

It’s a mixed bag, is what I’m saying. Isn’t it always?

Take The Kid’s neck issues. As with most things, I saw it as a season to endure before we got to the payoff of spring and healing. Now I’m recognizing that the burdens–and gifts–of that season endure far past the days on a calendar. It’s the intermingling of good and bad, difficult and easy, light and dark, that make life what it is: complicated and beautiful.

Because there is a certain kind of beauty that is only revealed when life is allowed to unfold in its own time. When happiness is permitted to be a byproduct rather than a goal. There is a freedom, and peace, that come when I break down the dividing wall between seasons and admit that life can show up in the middle of winter, in the presence of apparent darkness, in the seeming absence of reasons to hope. When I stop demanding that one thing pass before I give thanks or stop crying or start laughing.

Champagne doesn’t need an excuse.

“Sweetie, you shit your pants this year. Maybe you’re done,” Carrie tells Charlotte, who is afraid to run for fear of miscarrying, and it’s an idea I’ve been tempted to cling to when things have gotten just a little too difficult: Surely that’s it, right? We’re done now? But after a year of way more metaphorical pants-shitting than I would have ever deemed appropriate, I know now that’s not how things work. Because grace doesn’t place a limit on the amount of blessings it gives–even when those blessings arrive in packages I wouldn’t have chosen.

And the grave that you refuse to leave

The refuge that you’ve built to flee,

The places you have come to fear the most,

Is the place that you have come to fear the most.

I know that there’s a way to plot escape from the bad news of the world, and that self-protection can become a prison. It’s this knowledge–and the experience of it–that have convinced me of the opposite: that there is a door to freedom within the thickest of trials and the most painful of struggles. Living, truly living, means accepting the coexistence of all that seems contradictory, and watching as a narrative unfolds–in its own time–that makes perfect sense of these unlikely couplings. (And not insisting on consciously uncoupling them.. Oooh. Your move, Goop.)

So there are fewer afternoons now spent lounging at outdoor tables and more cocktail hours spent looking like Ricky Bobby after his ride with the cougar (yes, Talladega Nights was on TBS this weekend.) This is what happens when you have a two-year-old–and say yes to life without demanding a contract in advance. “Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world…and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens,” writes Buechner. New life doesn’t demand perfect lighting or clear certainty to grow…only grace.