By Andrea Lingle

I am an optimist. I like my windows open and my lawn sprinkled with wildflowers. I want to lead with an open heart, and I hate disappointment.

Deeply.

I will run a long way to avoid disappointing someone, and I have a terrible time deciding what I want (to eat, to do, to wear), because if you don’t know what you want, you won’t be disappointed. Disappointment hurts but in low caliber way. It isn’t suffering. It isn’t shattering. It is just disappointment. Let me be clear, this essay is about disappointment not suffering. As we explore the how we might learn to embrace disappointment, I am not including suffering in this discussion. Erik Erikson (I am going to go out on a limb and say he might have dealt with some personal disappointment in the creativity of his parent’s naming scheme) developed a series of psychosocial stages that describe what a mentally healthy life looks like. I would like to use them to explore the idea of sacred disappointment. I have been thinking about this idea the way that you might think about making chicken broth ice-cream. It probably won’t be good, but it would certainly be interesting.

Ready? Why not…

Disappointment is a product of desire. If you want things, it is possible, even likely, that you will experience disappointment. Disappointment is uncomfortable, perhaps painful, but it doesn’t extend to suffering. It is the emotional equivalent of twisting your ankle. It could be a quick twinge or leave you hobbling for months, but you aren’t going to lose your leg.

But for some reason, disappointment feels like a really big deal. The stoics recommend that you deny desire to avoid disappointment:

“The faculty of desire purports to aim at securing what you want…If you fail in your desire, you are unfortunate, if you experience what you would rather avoid you are unhappy…For desire, suspend it completely for now. Because if you desire something outside your control, you are bound to be disappointed; and even things we do control, which under other circumstances would be deserving of our desire, are not yet within our power to attain. Restrict yourself to choice and refusal; and exercise them carefully, within discipline and detachment.”—Epictetus, Enchiridion, 2.1-2

But it implies something which I would like to unpack.

The world cannot be trusted with your desire; therefore desire cannot be trusted.

We have learned to be ashamed of disappointment and desire. Why? Maybe it’s just me. No? You too? I can think of nothing that strips me of confidence like the idea of wanting something that I can’t have. Disappointment has the power of un-personing us through shame.

You should have known better than to want what you can’t have.

In infancy we learn whether or not the world is to be trusted. If I cry, will I be fed, changed, burped, or comforted? Before we learn to walk, we learn if we will be met by scarcity or abundance. We experience cycles of hunger and satiety, discomfort and comfort, around and around, until we learn to anticipate the character of the world.

For me, the world could be trusted.

When I cried, I was tended to. Again and again and again. My world was a stable place where need was met.

But somewhere along the way I began to notice a creeping disappointment: the world is a bit bleak. I want the world to be a generous place, but the grind of workplace, interpersonal conflict, and an endless disaster-news-cycle undermines even the most determined optimist.

The world is disappointing. What could that mean? Where could that lead us?

Could the optimist learn to embrace a sacred disappointment?