Bad Results

In case you missed it, the United States had a Presidential election recently. Some people were happy with the results, and some people were very, very unhappy with the results. Historically unhappy, I would say. I was one of the latter. In fact, the day after, I sat with my teenage son, who seemed as unnerved by the results as by the sight of his parents’ conspicuous despair. I explained to him that I was accustomed to thinking of the government as being like our home’s electricity, something I knew would be there to allow me to do the things I wanted to do. For the first time in my adult life I found myself wondering what life might be like if the electricity didn’t work, so to speak. But for me, at least, this nightmare scenario passed quickly from my mind. It had to. I had too many things I was interested in doing now. Of course, I’d had a lot of practice moving on from what I thought of as devastating results. For years, every story I wrote was burdened by what I hoped it would bring me in the future. If that story brought me the result I wanted, brought acceptance rather than rejection, then I would be free to live life as I imagined I was meant to live it.

It was too much for any story to give me, and I only ever got the results I believed I didn’t want. Oh, the despair. In the time it took me to read one letter, the entire future I had constructed in my imagination collapsed. I would sit for a time in this nightmare wreckage, unable to reassemble what I thought life would be, left instead with what life actually was. It was in those moments that I often noticed how immeasurably consistent life actually was. Though I couldn’t name it, something flowed through every moment that – like electricity – responded predictably to my every thought and action. No result, good or bad, could extinguish or amplify it. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to care one whit for results. It pulsed on, available, responsive, and tireless.

I began to get the results I had so wanted when I made a friend of that flow. To do so, however, I simply could not concern myself with the future. Not even a little. This was not, and still is not, so easy. I am still drawn to dream a future many shades of miserable, or whip up some airy, cotton-candy castle of hope. But I have found through practice that the dependable, creative, evolutionary impulse in the present moment, where all writing and life actually occurs, is a far more satisfying companion than all my hopes and fears.

Which is why, for now, I am not worried about the end of democracy. For now, it is still quite alive. If a time should come that some action on my part is called for, a petition to be signed or march to be joined, I trust that I will know to do so in that moment. However, that moment, for me, has not arrived. As I said, I’ve got a lot of other things I’m interested in doing right now. I have no crystal ball, but I do have eyes that can see what is immediately before me, and if I make a friend of what I see, if I accept it, I am immediately living life as it was meant to be lived.