The Book of Bad Things

This week I was remembering the short-lived experiment in which the CWP attended a private Episcopal school for third and part of fourth grade. Her spirited nature and inability to conform led to the odd phone call from the teacher and her perspicacious interpretation of the whole experience provided no shortage of dinner table hilarity. We’d be left especially helpless by her spot-on imitations of her music teacher, a tiny, eccentric martinet whose longing for retirement was blatantly obvious. She had a wicked knack for mimicry (something I shared in my youth, which for me made her riffs all the more delightful); we’d be floored by the accuracy of the gestures and intonations and hysterical at the content of the anecdotes.

One night she was regaling us with the day’s events, in which another child had done something slightly naughty in music class. Which is when we learned, in a sidesplitting reenactment, that his infraction was being recorded in The Book of Bad Things. Wait, we said. Is that real? When we recovered from our howling laughter, I tried to spark a discussion by asking if the kids thought there were other ways to discipline a student. My crew wasn’t having it; they were all about the absurdity. The next day, I found a hastily labeled notebook on the kitchen island. For a short while, we were all contributors of “bad things” with a humorous slant. I would add an escape by one of the dogs or an anonymous mess left in the bathroom or an irritation with my freelance job. Mostly it was the children venting their frustrations with each other with each other in a comical way.

It's probably no coincidence that The Book of Bad Things suddenly swam to the forefront of my consciousness some 15 years later, just as I’m facing personal challenges in addition to those provided by the world at large. And, of course, it was a short leap to my cranky thought: you wanna talk about bad things? And I was off, having scribbled the following in just minutes:

Violence of any kind. Call it war, call it retribution, call it genocide, it doesn’t matter. It’s bad.

The abuse of power, in any setting.

Our collective inability to put down the small electronic device that was supposed to revolutionize our lives but is insidiously ruining them.

Equating affluence and material possessions with success.

An olive branch tossed into a woodchipper.

The cynical destruction of an impartial media apparatus.

Cowardice in personal relations.

The growing popularity of conspiracy theories.

Reaching safety and pulling up the ladder.

The inability to allow others a differing viewpoint.

Character assassination.

Economic injustice.

A delusional sense of superiority.

Our warehousing of the elderly and infirm.

Judgement of others.

And then I heard another (slightly cheerier) little voice: Whoa, girl. Take a breath. It dawned on me that I almost missed what I loved about our long-ago Book of Bad Things: it was a way of humorously processing the things in our life we didn’t like, over which we had little or no control. Not taking the negatives in our lives so deadly seriously allowed us to let them go and move on.

So, just as I encouraged my kids to think of alternatives, I’m now encouraging myself to do the same. I can’t deny (or sometimes even ignore) all the heavy, unpleasant things going on around me right now. But I can try to accept my life as it is right now and choose to seek the light. Instead of railing against things I deem bad, I want to work at championing their opposite. The good things.

And in imagining a Book of Good Things, I realized I’ve been compiling one for years in the form of my daily gratitude lists. Which are easy to half-ass when things get tough. Color me reminded.

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Thanks for reading. Don’t you love when reminders come gently in the form of a funny memory? How do you deal with the swirl of “bad things” we are sometimes surrounded by?