Never Walked In High Heels

Her eyebrows furrowed as she looked at the road. Clutching the wheel of the car, she said in an almost commanding voice, “Sooner or later something good has to happen to you.” It was one of those conversations which can pretty much only come about during a long car ride when you have no other distractions and no one else keeping you company except for the person sitting next to you. The honesty of such a conversation comes from not being able to look at each other for fear of losing sight of what’s ahead of you and yet being so close that you can still touch. I could feel her frustration as I explained the situation I was in. Her knuckles had gone white from it; that much I could see even out of the corner of my eye and I did not want to take my eyes off the road either.

I’m not sure if the attitude is American or universal but there is no doubt a common misconception that life somehow owes us good times. We are entitled to continuously good turns, and if these are not constant, something must be wrong and someone; either ourselves, God, or some unknown entity must somehow be at fault. This outlook on life is, when anyone starts to think about it, difficult if not impossible to justify. Why do we assume that anything in life is necessarily owed to us, much less something so wonderful and so consistent that it can hardly operate in reality?

My father, for better or worse, considers himself to be a stoic in the most particular sense. As a teenage girl, living with the likes of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius in my own household gave way to a somewhat petulant adolescence. As I get older I find increasingly more and more problems with the stoic philosophy overall. More often than not it leads to an individual lying to himself , presuming that everything is functioning when it is not. Or worse yet, justifying oppression at the insistence that an individual be satisfied no matter what his state. But from my end, such philosophers do make a very valid point. Life is only bearable when an individual consciously decides to make the best of a situation out of choice, even when the entire circumstance is less than desirable. More often than not misery, as well as happiness, can be a willful decision rather than a representation of current circumstances.

Examining the modern world and how it chooses to communicate via mass media advertisements and even entertainment presents that life should be problem free and if something does go wrong it is either somebody’s else’s fault or representative of some great injustice. The rough times and continuous problems are inevitable, but without acknowledging that times are difficult and putting forth the stubborn effort to make the best of a situation, one of two outlooks occurs. The first is that of being overly rosy and sanguine, insisting that everything is behaving exactly as it ought to even when the world around you is constantly falling apart so that denial and consistent lies to ones self serves the ideals of any individual. The second is to look at difficulties in life as not only inevitable but impossible to avoid and create an overly cynical outlook; insisting that such injustice and inequality, difficult times, and distress is how the world ultimately works and there is no hope for betterment. One outlook presents itself as naivety which leads to disappointment; the other is disappointment which ultimately leads to despair. Neither are particularly functional.

It is a perhaps a counter evolutionary effort which causes an individual to see difficulties not only as being flawed and unjustified now, but at the same time keep the willingness to see beyond one’s present state to a better future. The enormous amount of energy needed to sustain such hope and almost absurd belief can only be classified as the willingness to grab life with both hands and not only make the best of what an individual is given to him but also see himself at a place in a specific point in history in which progress is inevitable. This is of course a tall order for any man in today’s age to subscribe to. More often than not we choose the overly optimistic approach, insisting that nothing is wrong in the first place or steeping ourselves in sarcasm and cynicism, insisting that not only do we not deserve our lot in life but that there is nothing that can be done which leads to any sort of peace, rest, and contentment in one’s own life.

My friend on the one hand is correct, something wonderful will happen again in either her life or my own. There is no doubt about it. As of right now, when things are less than ideal, I am willing to look a situation full in the face and label it as the disappointment that it is. But it is up to me to deem it as cruel, bad, or hopeless. We want to deny the fact but much of life, even the situations which we consider joyful of brilliant is difficulty and discomfort. The rest of life are the good things I bring to myself by choosing to see life for what it is in it’s present state, and also insisting on dwelling in the possibility of what life could be.

There is one t-shirt in my wardrobe that I always make sure to set aside and wash myself in the coldest water possible. Despite being over 25 years old, it is still bright gold and the emblem blazes in front of it in that vaguely rustic vintage attempt to look cool which somehow always works. It fits me perfectly, which is ironic because in about 1978, it was my father’s, then it was my mother’s, and now it is mine. I started wearing it more so when I went away to college because both of my parents wore the exact same shirt during their college years. Somehow it feels fitting and because of its connection to both of my parents, it is without a doubt my favorite t-shirt. They wore it for years before I ever came along, having their own visions of what they hoped their future would hold; visions of family and multiple children, dreams of owning a farm somewhere and creating specialty food stuff that usually it takes a 22 year old to be crazy enough to dream up. They no doubt envisioned their ideal life as they were dating and heading towards marriage with the same optimism that I now have for my life.

The shirt itself has a Jesus fish on it and a Greek word meaning “Christ” written underneath as the emblem. It came from a sort of campus outreach group that was meant to find students looking for a new faith in life and show them what Christian love and hospitality looked like. In many ways, people still consider colleges the greatest mission field in America, and students that belong to such groups are supposed to have faith, goodness and values no matter what. In college, combined with the right amount of religion and reading the right books and just the right amount of sunny days lying on the quad we are able to find our dream and a certain optimistic happiness that once we graduate, the world will be ours and everything will turn out okay. That sort of faith is of course more difficult to hold on to. Like an old t-shirt, it becomes just a little more frayed around the edges every time it goes into the wash and every time anyone throws it in the machine I always wonder if the shirt will survive and if my faith will survive another crisis. The same thing can be said about keeping faith in life as can be said about wearing my parents old t-shirt. Every time it’s up for a good hard washing, I clench my teeth a bit praying that it doesn’t disintegrate in the dryer. Somehow it doesn’t, it always comes out feeling a bit more comfortable.

Sometimes being stretched and run under water, weighted down, and bumping into life with it’s many stains causes material to fall apart which we always assumed would hold together in the first place, but ultimately the young keep on dreaming about what their life will be like and there will be generations pass down their well worn faith and security in hopes that it will serve their children well And somehow the dreams of youth never quite come out in the wash.