Handpicked
Have you ever felt rejected? Slighted, overlooked, dismissed?
Whether personally or professionally, most of us have experienced something along those lines. It might have been a devastatingly emotional matter like having the person you hoped to marry turn you down. Or something less fraught but still resentment-inducing, such as being passed over for promotion, or not receiving an invitation to a simcha you had your heart set on attending.
Our spirits are easily lowered. After a difficult interaction with a child or spouse, one might be forgiven for feeling dissatisfied with the current state of affairs. While trying to pay the bills with an inadequate paycheck, we may be understandably chagrined. Even bad weather on a day we’ve planned an outing can trigger dejection. Bottom line: We want things to go our way. Early on in life, we draw the outlines of a rosy future and then hope to spend the rest of our days blithely filling in the colors.
We grow up thinking that one day we’ll stumble across the finish line to that happy-ever-after we’ve been banking on. And in many ways, we do. Boruch Hashem, we have plenty to be grateful for. Still, we want it all. When some aspect of that beautiful ending eludes us, we are cast down. This was not how we pictured our lives turning out.
Each disappointment has the power to deepen our dissatisfaction. In our despondency, we can feel that our Creator has rejected or simply forgotten us. Doesn’t He know that I really wanted that?
Yes. He most certainly does know. And yet, He declined to shower us with the particular blessing we hoped for. Somehow, we need to come to terms with that.
The Afterthought
Anyone remember their Machanayim-playing days? Baseball? Dodgeball? Any kind of ball? When the teams were being picked, you hoped (despite your repeatedly demonstrated lack of athletic ability) that you’d be chosen early in the proceedings, and not left as an obviously reluctant pick at the end. No one likes to be regarded as an afterthought. We prefer being the chosen ones. The golden ones. The ones whom everyone else wishes they could be. Don’t we?
When things don’t go as we want them to, the way we feel that they should go, it can be hard not to feel bad. We had such high hopes when we launched this enterprise called life. We applied for complete and total satisfaction, and our application was rejected.
It’s no use being told that everything will eventually work out for the best. Our minds may be ready to accept the concept that disappointment and rejection are ultimately good for us, but our hearts are dead set against the whole idea. Spare me the homily, we feel like saying. I want to be happy now!
But here’s what we may not always be aware of. There’s happiness, and there’s happiness. Sometimes, when we have trouble envisioning a way in which our current dissatisfaction, or even devastation, can turn out to be a good thing, it’s not because that vision isn’t true. It’s because our imaginations are so limited.
Most of us have a very narrow way of picturing happy-ever-after. We want the straight-up fairy-tale ending, with no annoying complications cropping up in the sequel. And, if time managed to stand still after we married/had our first child/got that dream job/won that amazing prize, then we’d have exactly what we wished for. Happy-ever-after, full stop.
But that’s not how life works.
Launching Pad
It turns out that happy-ever-after is just a starting point. A launching pad, as it were, for everything that comes afterward… some of which is not what you pictured for yourself at all. When that happens, it’s hard not to feel forgotten. There are days when you feel like a fruit that some housewife’s hand has passed over in the produce aisle. Don’t I deserve to be picked for the blessings I long for? Am I not good enough to merit being chosen?
There’s an expression in the world of advertising: “Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back.” Well, where’s my refund if I’m dissatisfied with how my life is going?
I think that what’s called for is another way of looking at things. A way that is less immediate and more global. A way that goads our imaginations and forces them to stretch to encompass the unimaginable.
There’s more than one way to be happy. In the fullness of time, we are often astounded to realize that what we thought we wanted and needed to give us a joyous existence was actually not the only route to joy. There are all kinds of happinesses, not the least of which is the kind that’s woven into the incredible wealth of experience and richness of relationship that can develop from the very lacks we are forced to contend with.
Before we’ve gone through a challenging time or dealt with a disappointing development, it’s hard to imagine all the ways we may be enriched and rewarded by the experience. We can’t know what we’ve never had. Learning to accept Hashem’s will, learning to accept others’ weaknesses, learning not only to accept ourselves but to honor the tremendous reserves we managed to drag out of ourselves in response to disappointment or the challenge… this is the stuff of life. This, ultimately, is what turns us into people who are so much more than we could ever have envisioned in the days of our daydreaming youth. The days when all we hoped for was a smooth ride.
If someone could have tapped the unathletic baseball hopeful on the shoulder and whispered, “You’ll never shine at this game. You’ll never stand out in the schoolyard. But dealing with those things will help you in ways you can’t fathom right now. You’ll learn to appreciate parts of yourself that the schoolyard mentality may not consider worthy of admiration. You’ll make friends who will share their recess snacks with you, and their hearts. You can’t picture it now, because you haven’t lived that part yet. But guess what? You can be happy even if you can’t play ball for beans! And the happiness will be deeper and richer, because it came through suffering.”
The former you might have preferred the comfort of pizza and ice cream to such vague, rose-colored predictions about her future self. Pizza and ice cream are happy things that she can relate to; the future, not so much. This, again, is due to her circumscribed imagination. You can’t know what you haven’t yet experienced.
Hashem, to use my homely analogy, is like that housewife carefully walking down the aisle and choosing her produce. These apples would make a good pie; those are better for munching on at bedtime. These bananas are not yet ripe enough for what I have in mind for them. Those oranges have plenty of vitamins to keep my children healthy. And so on.
If life were a matter of blind Amalekian chance, we’d have good reason to feel despondent when things don’t go our way. But knowing that a loving Hand is picking out “fruit” especially for us goes a long way toward dispensing real comfort.
Let’s see now. For you, a dose of much-needed humility… For you, a chance to be forced out of your shell of shyness or complacency… For you, an opportunity to plumb the depths of another person’s soul in a way you never believed possible… For you, a way to stretch for a child and develop extraordinary compassion. For you…
It’s not only our produce that our benevolent Father hand picks for us. It’s our reading material, too. For each of us… a chapter in a book we would never otherwise have picked up, let alone read from cover to cover. To emerge at the other end a wiser, richer human being from whom many others can learn.
Every single thing that happens to us has been handpicked by One Who knows exactly what we need and how we truly want to end up, even if our limited imaginations don’t know it yet. And if that’s not reason for consolation, I don’t know what is!
