All That Glisters: An Alternative To The Bright Side

I think I’m done with the whole “silver linings” milieu. I have run out of both the will and the means to look on the sunnier side of things. I am no longer of making lists of the happy little coincidences that emerge from ongoing public health crises, rising fascism, human rights violations, and environmental destruction. There’s no wee treat I can glean from the bad guys winning, and walking all over us in the process. Try as I might (and I kind of don’t want to waste time trying), I can’t find silver linings to corruption, destruction, and misery. I won’t look for them anymore. I can’t.

Okay, now comes the part where I tell you that I’m not an insufferable pessimist. I could be accused of being a nihilist, but I’m the good kind of nihilist. I’m not ready to go crawl into barrel on the street and forsake the rest of the world. I have simply taken silver linings off the table, and I have replaced them with…

Teachable Moments.

I don’t believe that there is a tidbit of joy buried in every pile of nastiness, but I know there is most definitely information, and there is learning. These bits of information and learning are not handed to us, they are sought out. We find them, we create them, and if we are so bold, we share them. There is an unlimited supply of teachable moments. In any tragedy, in any injustice, there is still useful information.

Unlike a glittery, agreeable silver lining, a moment of learning can suck just as much as the dark times themselves. Teaching and learning are hard. But these moments do bring with them the possibility of change and growth. They empower and grant ownership. We aren’t owed anything pleasant and reassuring, but if we put on our boots and go looking for it, there will be the potential (and the necessity) for re-evaluation, for finding what we’re capable of, in both a negative and positive sense.

Maybe, in a teachable moment, we’ll learn that we aren’t as well informed as we thought we were. We might learn that we aren’t as nice as we thought we were. We could see that we’re a bigger part of the problem than we’d like to admit. We might figure out who to trust, and who to not overlook. It could mean discerning which of the things we’ve been doing are helpful, and which are harmful. Teachable moments tie us to others in a way that silver linings do not, and they make clearer the consequences of our actions. They stare us in the face and ask what we’re going to do about it, and refuse to take “well, it’s not that bad” as an answer.

The trick with a teachable moment is, we have to be willing to learn, to practice, to act. A silver lining gives us “Well, it kind of worked out in the end.” It gives us license to be passive, to accept sloppy leftovers, and to dismiss the misery they came in on. Teachable moments tell us “No, it was still f-ing hard, but we didn’t sit around waiting for things to fix themselves.”

I guess if we wanted to really spin things a certain way, if we wanted to get pedantic, we could see teachable moments as a species of silver lining. “That was hell, but boy, I did get some valuable lessons out of it!”  Nah. It just doesn’t seem to pack the same punch as “Now we know better, so we do better.”

Things are so much harder than I thought they would be, and I’m one of the luckier ones. There are so many who live with a baseline of regular, everyday horror, and I still wonder if a new layer of nightmare has been ladled onto their lives. It doesn’t seem the right point in history to count our blessings and be grateful for what we have. Small mercies and creature comforts just don’t seem like enough anymore. It seems more appropriate to be schooling ourselves about the underpinnings of our current state in an effort to persist and resist.

I don’t want to shrug and accept any more. I don’t want to find the sunny spot on a dark day. I want to learn.