Disappointment
Pause to Ponder
Anne Lamott once wrote, “Maturity is gaining a modicum of grace when you do not get your own way.” I like that Anne used the word “modicum,” the equivalent of a smidgeon—just a teeny, tiny bit. Disappointment is hard, no matter our age, and life is full of it.
Perhaps the grace that comes with growing older stems from decades of witnessing the unpredictable nature of life, and from more experiences where we didn’t initially get what we wanted, but the disappointment ultimately opened up possibilities we’d never even imagined.
Learning to ride unavoidable waves of disappointment with more ease and agility helps us become more skilled at relaxing into the natural flow of life instead of futilely fighting against it. As Yung Pueblo says, “Letting go requires repetition; it is a muscle that you need to build that is in direct opposition to the muscle of attachment.”
For me, part of maturing has been about breaking ingrained patterns of emotional suppression and avoidance, as well as learning to soothe myself with patience, love and compassion when difficult feelings arise.
My 3-year-old grandson has been a wonderful teacher. I study him with great interest as he freely expresses his sadness and frustration stemming from disappointment with loud howls and voluminous tears. Just like him, I’m learning that waves of upset rise, peak, and then eventually pass. Life goes on. Smiles return.
In his wonderful book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, the wise poet and philosopher, David Whyte, talks about how disappointment is essential to human evolution:
“The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away…
Disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience.
Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something more difficult, more overwhelming and strangely, in the end, more rewarding.”
—David Whyte
If you, like me, are working on ways to more skillfully embrace all of your emotions, we have a free resource, Embrace Every Emotion for you to explore. It was created in partnership with mindfulness and meditation teacher, Katie Dutcher, and includes the following 10-minute guided meditation, “Working with Difficult Emotions.”
In this guided meditation, learn to sense and embrace your emotions, especially the difficult ones that can be so uncomfortable, responding to yourself with kindness and care.
