The day I got married, we had our pictures taken in a beautiful park full of open fields and stone walls, giant trees and small ponds. The kind of joy I felt on that day was so pure, and in many ways simple—I was surrounded by friends and family, freshly married to the man I wanted to spend all my days with. It was deep, deep joy.
While we were taking pictures at the park, our limo bus broke down. The driver had shut it off while we were having our pictures taken and it wouldn’t start again. We, along with our entire wedding party, were without a way to get to the reception, but when I found out, I didn’t care. Even though the limo bus-- the whole day-- was a finely timed, intentionally cultivated, slightly-more-expensive-than-I’d-hoped event. It might have been the first time in my life that I didn’t leap to resolve a situation, that I didn’t immediately begin stressing about the implications. I knew we’d get there somehow, even if it was late and unglamorous. I just felt incredibly lucky to be in the moment I was in.
So we were stuck at that park as the sun dipped down and the moon rose up to replace it in the sky. Our friends and family were working on a solution, so we walked up a big sloping hill with our photographers to take pictures in the moonlight. Those pictures that we never planned on taking are among my favorites from the day. Hanging in my dining room wall right now is one of those shots: my husband and I standing on the stone wall that ran across the top of the hill, and in the distance, at the bottom of the hill, you can just make out the lights from our limo bus, running again and ready to bring us to the party.
Here is the thing, and I have to remind myself of this over and over again: sometimes the limo bus breaks down. It just does. You don’t have a choice about that, but you do have a choice about how you react. You can stress, worry, try to fix it. Or you can relax, go with the flow, and have an experience that will serve as a lifelong reminder of how the things that go wrong can actually turn out better than you ever could have planned.
We all want life to have this forward momentum, a feeling of progress. We want to reach goals on our own timing, on our own terms. We barrel ahead always thinking we know best.
I still do that. But I think about that day, about that bus breaking down. How I didn’t care because I had a clear focus on what actually mattered. How I went with what life flowed to me and ended up with a pleasant surprise. I think about the way the moon slid upward in the sky, shone on us gently in that way that she does, and I think about how I never really noticed the moon then, but always notice her now.
Sometimes I think we exaggerate our disasters and make them worse than they are, worse than they need to be. I have come to believe that the secret to getting through the tough moments involves nothing complex; it is about breathing and accepting and reigning in your mind (not complex, but, yes, challenging). It’s about a decision, to find joy anyway, even when it’s so hard you would declare it impossible.
I would have missed the magic, that day, had I tried to control and fix, had I freaked out and melted down, had I done anything other than relax and go with it.
I want to be that way everyday, not just when I’m riding the high of what I knew would be one of the best days of my life. Can I be that way, in the tumult of a child’s tantrum? Can I be that way, when my career seems to stall? Can I be that way, when the house is a mess and the to-do list is long?
I’m learning that I can. It’s a practice. Each time I think I’ve mastered it, I slip into madness again. But then I learn from it. That is the secret, I think, of everything that ever happens, is learning from it and moving on better than before.
Oh don’t get me wrong. There are still things I can’t imagine an upside to, headlines that make me wonder if I’ve got it all wrong and life is actually bad, horrible, unfair, unrelenting. I think it’s also important to sit for a minute, or an hour, a day, a week, when the really bad things happen and acknowledge how bad it sucks, how thoroughly this is something that you just can’t compute.
And then you pull yourself up by the light of the moon, the grace of her. There is something you can count on: every night, she is there, even when you can’t see her. That can steady you; in this crazy world that some days makes no sense, she will appear and even if that is all you can find that’s reliable and honest, well, there it is, then.
The moon hangs right outside my bedroom window and when it is full it floods light into the room, straight onto my bed, and I open the curtains to welcome her in.
