Disappointment
Today’s question: How are you disappointed in life, in this moment? What if your disappointment were the key to understanding what this moment longs to give you? - Rev. Hans Peter Meyer
Apprenticeship to Love: June 18, 2025
TODAY’S MEDITATION
I have wondered why I am, after 45 years of indifference, a hockey fan again. This morning it's a little clearer.
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Trust the process. What does that really mean? And how does one do this?
A teacher I follow talks about the difference between preference and what is experienced.
Mostly, I experience this difference as disappointment. I'm learning, slowly, to see that this is a choice. But my point here isn't just that I can choose, or not choose, disappointment when my preferences aren't realized. It's that, as this teacher suggests, in noticing this difference I may find a way through. An opportunity.
More and more, my disappointment becomes the way I get to experience a richness in life (and love) that is obscured by my preferences. The way I want things to be is so often what stands in the way of experiencing, appreciating, and enjoying what is standing in front of me.
I am learning to know what it means when I say to my beloved: I have preferences, but I have no expectations. She tells me she is beginning to trust this. I am amazed.
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The hockey team we cheer for lost last night. Not just a game, but the deciding game in the trophy-winning series. My preference is that this team would be this year's Stanley Cup champions. My experience is otherwise. This morning I get to sit with this difference, and notice what I do.
One of the things I'm noticing is a confusion of feelings. Disappointment, for sure. But that disappointment I know comes from several experience of "difference." It is, in fact, a season of disappointments. I'm noticing this, and allowing this feeling-choice to fade.
What's left? Acceptance. And then, curiosity. Above all, curiousity.
I've long enough now –or: I've learned long enough now, because it's not so clear to me that years have much to do with this– to know that others, and this world, will move and act and speak in ways that are not my preference. I need to know my preferences and notice the differences. I also need to be aware of how my preferences can and will change, and that my choices here and now have a profound impact on my life, and the lives around me. Allowing my preferences to change helps me to know something more beautiful than I can imagine: that there is a flow of life and life and beauty, and it is constantly in a state of unfolding. My choice to be disappointed stops me from knowing this flow, this flowering.
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I buy paintings by local artists. One of these, by Lisa Kirk, is "She Flies Away." It came into my home several years ago, not long before the woman I love arrived. For me, the painting and this woman are connected. From them and through them I learned a lot about how to allow more love, more beauty, and more joy to flow through my life.
She flies away. She will not be limited by my preferences. If I hold her and when I hold her, with confidence and without fear, with generosity and without disappointment, I have much to be grateful for. Much to marvel at. Much to allow to change, to flie away.
Her truth is not something I can own, except in the sense of appreciating her. Revering her.
She flies away. Again and again. And again. Endlessly.
I am learning to expect less. Learning to be more and more curious about the comings and the goings, and what they stir in me. In her. In those around me.
It's not always pretty. It's rarely what I prefer.
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Disappointment is real. It stings. I can feel myself wanting to close. But there is another part of this sting, that shows me I am more than my seeming needs. I don't need to be stuck in my disappointment. I can choose to allow it to show me where and how I can facilitate and revere the flow.
TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE
Disappointment practice