Those Tarnished Silver Linings

Bitmoji rendition of a thumbs-up

I've been listening to (and introducing my teenager to) Tom Lehrer's more politically satirical songs. This has given me glimmers of hope because, well, a lot of this stuff has gone down before. The details are different, to be sure, and we hear more about it more quickly (thanks, Internet), but still, a lot of it is SSDD. So a (somewhat tarnished) silver lining of this ridiculous situation that my country is in is that my teenager is - sometimes in spite of herself - more interested in twentieth-century history.

Her thoughts on Wernher von Braun are priceless, but not quoted here without her permission, which I can't ask her for because she is at school. Which is another silver lining; she is enjoying school for the first time in about nine years... but that took almost nine years of massive anxiety and testing and stress and therapy and angst to find the right fit.

I am usually pretty good at finding that silver lining (no matter how tarnished) in any given situation (no matter how grim) and these days it's pretty much a requirement for sanity if one is not an off-grid hermit on a remote mountaintop or something. It's not always big, and it often takes a while, but I can usually manage eventually. Sometimes there's even guilt attached, because I'm the sort who feels guilty about almost everything, just as I worry about almost everything. That's what therapy is for, after all.

I fail to see the silver lining for most of what's going on in the world these days, but little things - like Lizzy enjoying Tom Lehrer and learning from it, or the situation with certain companies giving me that push to order my favorite goodies directly from the manufacturer and benefiting thereby - these things are the silver linings I speak of.