Tag: Anrael Lovejoy

Good News, Bad News

One constant I’ve come to rely on in life is universal truth. Certain stories circulate and resurface regularly on our radar because they hold wisdom or guidance that all humans can relate to. Writers who tap into universal truths often present more resonant stories because there are nuggets of truth relevant to all human experience.

A universal truth is something that resonates with all humanity. It’s something that others can relate to and/or can be a lesson that we’ve learned. We may sometimes recognize something as a universal truth but are not always able to understand it initially. Thus the belief that time increases wisdom as we see a universal truth repeated in different contexts over our lifetimes.

Universal truths reflect something essential about the human condition or key events in people’s lives, including birth, death, emotions, aspirations, conflicts, and decision-making.

Universal truths help us understand life better and also help us deal with emotional and psychological challenges. We may come to realize that much of what we encounter in life is not entirely what it seems at first – good or bad.

When my friend Anrael Lovejoy recently published a post about an old Chinese proverb colloquially known as the “Good News, Bad News” story, I was happy to be reminded of it. https://anraellightheartedvoice.substack.com/chat/posts/a0da9da1-bc2f-4207-92d5-75eee44a4344

For more context into its Asian origins, I present the story below as I found it on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse

The story is about a Chinese farmer who loses a prized horse (bad news) but the horse returns to him with many other horses (good news). His son breaks his leg trying to break one of the new horses (bad news). Then war erupts, and due to his impairment, the son is passed over for conscription (good news). And so it goes, in perpetuity.

We might recognize the essence of this story in our own culture as the platitudes of “clouds with silver linings” or “blessings in disguise.” The story becomes relatable when you apply it to situations in your own life.

For example, we are mid-move. A heinous process as many transitions are. So much upheaval and stress and not being able to find things and disrupting routines accompanied by a general disintegration of one’s sunny and steady personality. Speaking personally.

This week, a fridge was delivered and meant to fit between two existing cupboards. The fridge was a half inch too wide to fit in the assigned space. The modifications required to make it fit would have been amateur and tacky looking. Accch! We gave the problem twenty-four hours. And voila. We decided to take out the dysfunctional existing cabinet and plan to replace it with one that will be much more useful to our needs.

Earlier in the move, our painter tipped over a full gallon of dark blue paint on a light brown carpet. Acccch! I watched in horror as the deliciously dark paint seeped across and into the carpet. The funniest part was me bolting in a huff to a hardware store to buy “cleaning” products to remove the stain. Ya. That’ll happen. I returned the unneeded products the next day.

The solution? The carpet was eventually taken up and replaced with laminate flooring. It is a much more hygienic and sensible long-term outcome for our health and comfort. Our lungs won’t be aggravated by dust whenever we walk into a room. The “disaster” became a gateway to a better solution.

You may be thinking those changes cost money. You would be right. But here is another universal truth. Anything that makes your living space more comfortable and practical is an investment worth making over the long run. These changes add value. That is a win in my view.

In the case of both the ripped-out carpet and the dysfunctional pantry cabinet, the replacement will serve us much better. Our initial bad news became good news longer term.

Writer Rudyard Kipling summed up this phenomenon in our culture in his legendary poem, If, published in 1913. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%E2%80%94 “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same.”

One element of learning necessary lessons to achieve maturity, Kipling suggests. I most heartily agree with him.

Chaos and Order

We long for order. We fight for order. We spend money on boxes, bins, baskets, labels, label makers, file labels, file folders, file cabinets, cupboards, closets, containers, crypts, efficiency experts, and efficiency systems. All to create to order.

We despair when order eludes us. I sure do. I think this longing for order and certainty is a metaphor for fighting against life’s inevitable outcome. We all disappear and dissolve into chaos eventually. We depart this world. This is non-negotiable. Not knowing what awaits us after death (if anything) has been the subject of speculation for centuries.

Still, we often negotiate like crazy against impending darkness and often do so right up until the very end. For all the good it does us. I think I have devised a way to make friends with death. Well, my own death anyway. I have lived so many realities in my time on this planet and have never settled all that comfortably into any of them.

When your early life begins in chaos, you learn to distrust order. You long for it but when it is upended and taken away so often, order becomes suspect and sterile. People living in peace and order – went my dysfunctional thinking – live in denial and delusion. Not only that, their lives are undoubtedly dry and boring. This was my comfortable justification for something I did not have and was uncertain I could ever achieve.

It is true that on this planet, order is essential to success. That is why we have a gazillion systems and products and recommendations for how to achieve it. To play the game of life successfully (in our culture, at least), you must have your ducks in a row. At law school, I met earnest young lawyers-to-be who were not particularly intellectually gifted, but I was consumed by suffering and envy for the order in their course notes.

My cousin Pat Good is a quilter and more generally, a fabric artist. Quilting requires order and an ungodly level of patience and stick-to-it-ism. As do any of the creative arts. Would you read this if my thoughts and words were helter-skelter all over the page and disconnected? I didn’t think so.

Writing has been a discipline of self-imposed order on a chaotic environment. Mom betrayed me? I wrote down exactly what she did (supported my ex-husband over me) and how I felt about it (confused and devastated, naturally). I don’t trust my memory more than anyone else should. But when it is right there, written down in blue and white (my preferred inkpen color), years later, I can still read and recall the truth of that moment.

That has helped me in many ways. When I was being gaslighted by my mother or ridiculed and dismissed by my mother, the journals I kept took me back to my truth as it had been in that moment.

There was one particularly telling exchange with my mother. I told her I kept a journal and had written down the details of our many confrontations after they happened and her decidedly unmotherly actions: “You could have made all that up!” she chortled. But I didn’t.

There is order I see and believe in daily and that is in nature. Unlike humans, nature doesn’t busy itself with running around changing its’ environment willy-nilly exclusively for power and monetary gain. The path of nature unfolds in some kind of divine order that I am never going to fully get in this lifetime.

We are born but let’s face it, we don’t know where the hell we came from. We know the biology and have fiddled with that dramatically in recent years. But where does the spark of creation come from? Damned if I know.

What I do know or believe is in “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” we came from the great formlessness and to it we will one day return. I am slowly getting this. In our writer’s group the other day, the ethereal and spiritually evolved Anrael Lovejoy said words to the effect – lest I misquote her – “We are formless before we are conceived and after death, return to formlessness.” Ever insightful and a thinker of deep thoughts is my friend, Anrael.

Everything we do – from birth to grave in the middle – are finger-tapping exercises. Best then that we have fun with the time we’ve been allotted.