Almost a year ago, a really Bad Thing happened. It changed my life forever and changed the way a lot of people look at me, too. This is not a story about the Bad Thing. It’s a story about what came after.
After, months after, I was at dinner with friends. It was New Year’s Eve, which has always been my favorite holiday, but I wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. The conversation turned to looking back on the year that was about to be over, and I felt the tension start to crackle around the table. Everyone knew how my year had been, and they knew better than to ask about it.
“What was the best part of your last year?” Lauren asked. She is younger than the rest of us, and therefore full of the optimism that adulting had long since killed in the thirty year olds of our group.
We humored her. Around the table, Alex talked about a personal best at the Reston Triathlon that year and Ryan shared his happiness at starting to date Lauren. My husband was up next, and he surprised me. He’s not usually what most people would call an optimist. In fact, he’s about as glass half empty as you can get.
“August and September were really great. And they’re even better to look back on now, because I know how quickly things can change,” he said. It was my turn next and I just nodded. I couldn’t have put it any better.
Usually, I’m an annoyingly positive person. You can ask any of the other teachers. When everyone is exhausted and having a super bad day, I come bounding around the corner of the hallway, all excited about something good that had happened. But over the course of the last months of the fall, I had let my positivity dim. It was understandable, even expected. And it needed to change.
“So, everyone,” Kate started up. “What about New Year’s Resolutions?”
While everyone shared goals about pounds to lose and books to finally get around to reading, I thought about what I could do to find my optimism again. As a pretty big Harry Potter geek, I jumped to the words of Albus Dumbledore at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. “Happiness can be found in even the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light.” I’ve always liked that line, and it means even more to me now. It reminds me that we all have a choice in how we perceive what we’re going through.
Bad Things happen. Unfortunately, we often can’t even control them. What we can control is how we decide to move forward. How we decide to see our days. We can decide to turn on a light.
“I’m going to write down one good thing every day,” I said when it was my turn. “It might be something major, like an accomplishment, or something silly and little. As long as it’s good, it counts.”
I did. September is almost over, and this is the New Year’s Resolution I’ve kept up with the longest. Each day, my phone alarm goes off at ten pm and reminds me to add one more good thing to the note I have kept all year. Some of them are obvious, like my Nana finding out that her cancer isn’t going to be terminal after all. Some of them are simple, like the really great sunset we got to enjoy on our first night at the cabin. More of them are about food than I’d care to admit. Together they make up a pretty good year, at least as far as I can remember.
Focusing on the good things has helped me to let the bad things fade into the distance, and I think that’s what Dumbledore was trying to tell his students. He isn’t a perfect teacher. Goodness knows he leads Harry into danger on more than one occasion. If you ask Rita Skeeter, he’s borderline evil. In this case, though, I think he was looking out for his students after a bad thing. He doesn’t ask them to ignore the darkness, or hide from it as adults like to tell kids to do. He reminds them that they have a choice to turn on the light.
Of course, Dumbledore isn’t real. We can take the words as either his or JK Rowling’s. She knows a lot about going through dark times, having lost her father just before coming up with the idea that would ultimately change her life. I’m definitely willing to trust her.
Once you’re in “after,” it’s easy to get lost in the darkness. It’s easy to keep telling the stories of the bad things that happen, but that won’t make them unhappen or hurt less. The only thing you can do to pull yourself out is to make the choice to do so. I chose to turn on a light, however small, every day. And it brought me back to who I really am.