It feels dark out there. Screwed up. Frustrating. What are these people doing? Don’t they understand how precarious things are? Look at what’s happening overseas. Look at what happens in the shadows. Look at what’s happening in broad daylight right where you live!
It’s awful. It’s depressing.
But you know who isn’t doing this? Who isn’t raging or despairing? Your children. “Children can snatch happiness from even the darkest times,” Karen Joy Fowler writes in her amazing novel Booth (a must read, alongside her other family novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.) “That’s God’s gift, that’s how God loves children.”
Our children’s ability to be happy anywhere—on the floor of an airport during a weather delay, during a pandemic lockdown, during an economic crisis—should teach us something. They don’t carry the weight of the world on their shoulders…and neither should you. They focus on what they can do. They find something to do. They laugh. They play. They are present.
Of course, they are innocent and young and ignorant. They are free of responsibilities that we are not. But still, we can learn from them. We can snatch happiness here and there, we can find the good in every situation…we can find the happiness and good in them.