how to feel better about feeling bad

on accepting that life is 50% yay and 50% nay.

It was the Saturday after the kids had started back at school after summer break, and I was walking out to my office pod in the garden, which is the place I work, and the place the kids throw water balloons against during the summer. (I still work in the summer, but badly.)

I had a thought. “Hey, what happened to the hammock?”

I live in Argentina, in the southern hemisphere, so technically I asked about the hamaca Paraguaya, which is what we call hammocks here. Paraguayan hammocks. The word in Spanish for swing is plain old “hamaca”, hence the differentiator.

It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered about the hammock.

I’d had the thought the week before, but it had disappeared before it came out of my mouth, buried behind a list of back-to-school items I was already hard up with. When I asked the question, I could hear some mumbling, some dissension, the familiar, “No, Santi!” from one brother to another. The hammock, my daughter said, had been fixed. This reminded me that it had been broken in the first place, and that was why it got pulled down at some point last year.

“Can we put it up, then?” I said. I had never learned how to put up the hammock.

Later that afternoon, I found our nanny of more than a decade sitting in a chair next to the hammock, pulling the rope she had attached to it when the boys were little, because it was easier to pull them that way, one twin knocking against the other as they slept to the swaying.

“It’s up!” I said, and then I saw one of my seven-year-olds was inside, spread out like a Roman god, narrating his life to someone he loved. I smiled, happy.

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And then I kept talking. “I’m so mad we forgot about the hammock all summer.”

The next morning, when I opened my curtains and stepped out onto the balcony of the second floor of our house, I looked down. It wasn’t even eight yet and they were already down there, in the hammock.

My daughter had her laptop, and was clicking away, working on her story about “snowintists”, which are scientists who determine if snow is fake or not, because in her story there are a lot of people in Colorado who try to pass off fake snow as real. Hence the need for the scientific specialty.

“I’m so mad we forgot about the hammock,” she said.

“Exactly!” I said. “All summer! Can you believe it?”

“It’s so nice,” she said. “So relaxing.”

“It’s too bad we missed a whole summer of relaxing in the hammock.”

Recently, a thing happened in my life that bowled me over with regret. Within an hour, a podcast appeared in my feed about the very issue. It was from The Life Coach School, a podcast the life optimization internet algorithm I am circling the drain of had recommended to me at some point, and which I tune into from time to time.

In it, the host Brooke Castillo is talking about regret. She tells the story of a client who made a big financial mistake and regrets it. Brooke told the client she also has made big financial mistakes she regrets but with every regret she moves on to try and make a better decision the next time. But then Brooke says that there are many more regrets in her future, and in the future of the client, about things they haven’t even thought about yet.

That’s when Brooke brings up the topic of life being 50-50.

I’ve heard her mention this before. The idea, as she explains in this short video, is that life is always going to be 50% “good” and 50% “bad.” (Yes, just go with those words as a placeholder for whatever you prefer.) The problem is most of us believe 100% “good” is the goal of life we should be working towards. That if we had the right coworkers and the right meditation program and the right spouse and the right nourishing keto meals life would be 100% good, or at least 90%. But the truth is that life will always be 50-50. The specific highs and lows will change, but the sooner we accept the fact that half of life is “good” and half is “bad”, the faster we can get on with the living.

Life will always be 50-50. The specific highs and lows will change, but the sooner we accept the fact that half of life is “good” and half of life is “bad”, the faster we can get on with the living.

There’s no way for me get back a whole summer with the hammock. And yet with a brain like mine there is endless opportunity to ruminate on the summer I didn’t have with the hammock, to keep massaging idea that we are dumb as hell for not remembering to put it up, and then to beat myself up for bothering to have the thought in the first place. Brooke’s point is to stop. She has tools, simple things to help redirect the brain in its incessant loops, which I’m not going to mention, but you can certainly find on her website.

But for me it’s that 50-50 thing that most sticks with me.

Because the idea that life is not a stairway to perfection takes away some of the sting of doing the “bad” thing (the actual forgetting of the hammock) and then ruminating on the “bad” thing (the fact that I forgot the hammock). Because no matter how much work I do on myself, half of all the summers of all my life I am going to mess up other stuff just as much as I messed up this summer, with the hammock.

Them’s the breaks.

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