Antidote

Leanne Mya's Audition, BGT, May 2019

I belong to a group that meets to write together on very personal themes. We read a few short pieces--poems or snippets of essays, we let everyone know how we are doing, and then we write on our theme for half an hour or so. It is meant to be heartfelt and honest, not polished and literary. Afterward there is time to read aloud what we have written, if we want to. The option is always there to not read so that we will write what we most need to say, not edit it for public consumption.

Toward the end of March we took the theme "disappointment." This is what I wrote.

Disappointment

My first thought was, “What is ‘appointment’?” How can I think I understand disappointment when I don’t know its root word?[1]

I don’t go in for disappointment as much as I used to, though it still runs through the seams of life. Every time I listen to the news or go on Twitter I’m confronted by disappointing things. How can we make such bad choices for ourselves and our world, over and over, repeatedly? Why is so little of the news we see extraordinarily good? How could Robert Müller hand over the results of his two year investigation to a Trump appointee who of course would bury them? So very disappointing.

Perhaps that’s why I feed the birds, and make space for spiders and insects in my home. Why I like to watch joyous auditions on Ireland’s or Britain’s Got Talent: as a partial antidote to that onslaught of disappointment, heartbreak, and yes, fear. To see someone throw heart and soul into a song or dance, then burst into tears when the audience and judges praise them; to watch a Russian crow roll down a snowy windshield for sport, a longhorn bull play with a giant inflated ball, a long-tailed tit try leaving the nest for the first time—and change her mind. These tiny singularities are poised against a supermassive black hole of sorrowful news. Tiny but powerful. They blow air back into my lungs and life into my soul.

(Click on these photos to see the videos.)

Russian Crows

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[1] For the curious: The Online Etymology Dictionary tells me this: disappoint (v.): mid-15c., disappointen, "dispossess of appointed office," from dis- "reverse, opposite of" + appoint, or else from Old French desapointer "undo the appointment, remove from office" (14c., Modern French from désappointer). Whereas: disappointment (n.): 1610s, "defeat or failure of hope or expectation," from French désappointement or else a native formation from disappoint + -ment.