The Disappointment Myth

I’m not sure what it was that opened you up to the world of disappointment.  Perhaps your first taste came when you realized Santa didn’t always bring everything you asked for.  Or maybe it was when you realized there was no man in a red suit and it was your parents all along.  Worse, maybe it came when your Santa-playing-parents told you they were splitting up.

Over the years I’m sure your disappointment has taken on all shapes and sizes.  Some disappointments are very small, like the pickles placed on your “plain” cheeseburger.  Others are incredibly large, like the hole in your heart when a loved one left you.

Regardless, each time disappointment breaks in we feel as though something has been taken from us; a robbery of the worst kind.  It steals our innocence, kidnaps our truest self, and holds for ransom our best assumptions of others and this world. 

Once we are introduced to the world of disappointment many of us never leave.  It becomes our permanent place of residence.  We live in a state of perpetual disappointment for fear that something might capture our heart and affection only to have it swiped from us yet again.  Our instincts for self-preservation kick in and we decide no longer to attach ourselves to hopes, desires, and aspirations.

After all, if dreams are just a lure for the snare of disappointment, then skepticism might just keep us alive.

But that is the myth.

Skepticism may feel like a blanket of security, but it only suffocates the potential for new life to breath.  The strange reality is that the only true way to move out of the world of disappointment is to put yourself back out there; to aspire and hope again, and…

to run the risk of further disappointment.

But, this is where the nature of disappointment is revealed.  Disappointment is not the enemy or adversary.  Instead, disappointment is a gauge…

a barometer of our hope.

Disappointment is the proof that we are a people who take risks; that we are a people who dream.  Proof that we are a people, who in a broken world, believe healing is possible.

May you never be lost in the world of disappointment again.  May your disappointment reveal to you and others that you are someone who believes in the possible.  And may your disappointment be engulfed by the courage to dream again.

Giving Up On the Game

“How are you, young man?  No doubt you’re expecting a lecture, but I promise that’s the last thing I intend.  Your decision to leave medical school is your own entirely.  I can even understand and sympathize.  Around the third year, when exhaustion and nausea have taken up permanent residence in your bones, the healing profession seems less like a calling and more like and exercise in expedience and venality.  I understand that brand of despair better than I wish.  But it’s a different decision you’ve made that troubles me more deeply.

I mean your choice to give up golf.”                        - The Legend of Bagger Vance

Idealism, promise, expectation, hope.  These are all good things.  These elements do more than get us out of bed in the morning; they propel us into each day with the anticipation that something remarkable and worth while will take place.

We are a burst of energy in which no obstacle is too big.  Exhaustion never even gets a chance to yawn because we are awakened to a mission bigger than ourselves.  We embody the change we want to bring to the world and we believe we can do anything.

Then…

Challenge flanks us in a manner totally unexpected; completely blind-sided.  We see a side to the Opposition that we never saw before and we are left disarmed, disrobed, and disheartened.  The ideal, once fuel for life, offers nothing but the bitter taste of “what could have been”.

Cynicism encroaches as we question the work, the calling.  “What’s the point?”, “Why bother?” “Where’s the meaning?” become just a few of the rhetorical questions we feast on.  We come to a grinding halt.

We give up.  We are sidelined.  We are beaten.  Something within us dies.

And we are left with a choice:

Fade away until nothing is left.

or…

Keep playing.

May you, in your moment of defeat, your season of disillusionment, be filled with just enough promise to believe that giving up on the game is never an option.  And may you have the courage to keep showing up to the life no one else has been gifted to live.