The Privilege of Your Problems
Have you ever stood in front of something old enough to outlast everyone who made it and felt the ground shift a little under you?
That is where Annie F. Downs begins in her final episode of her season with Candace. She tells a story about an afternoon she spent alone at the Met, the day after Thanksgiving, after her whole family had left town. She loves the big wall-sized portraits, the real people someone painted centuries ago, and she stops in front of one of three friends. Two of them sit, one stands, his dog at his feet. The little placard explains that the standing man commissioned the painting of himself and his friends. It was painted in the 1800s, and clearly none of them are alive anymore.
What catches Annie is not the painting but what it no longer holds. The men in it are finished. Every decision they will ever make is made. Every problem is solved, every surprise already spent. And Annie, standing there breathing, isn’t a portrait yet. She still gets to wonder how things will turn out. She still gets to fall in love, to argue with someone, to decide what’s for dinner. The worry she carries, she says, is a privilege the people on the wall no longer have.
The conversation turns toward the thing both of them keep circling: the problems in front of you are proof that you’re still here. Annie puts it plainly when she talks about what she can do now that she won’t be able to do later. The writer of the Gospels points to a life meant to be lived fully, and Annie and Candace keep returning to the idea that worshiping God through pain is something you can only do on this side of things. Nobody in a museum is doing that anymore.
None of this is a trade of hard feelings for happy ones, as Annie is careful to point out. She talks about crying often, even in a happy week, and about a painful change that happened at one of the companies she runs. She names that sadness and, in the same breath, notices the small beautiful thing: a golden kiwi, a Sumo orange, strawberries from the store. The two don’t have to weigh the same to both be real. The immature version, she admits, was the one that buried the hard thing and announced that everything was fine. The grown version lets gratitude and grief share the room.
Annie offers a lesson she picked up at a counseling retreat: every meaningful experience changes a person by about two degrees. You don’t feel it on day one or day five, but point yourself two degrees off your current course and, given enough time, you’ll end up somewhere entirely different. Saying out loud that you want to go back to school. Asking the question about God you have never been brave enough to ask. Applying for the job at your church. None of it feels like an eighty-degree turn. It feels like almost nothing, but it reshapes a life.
That idea is best illustrated in Annie's current season of life. She talks about getting married this year, learning to trust what she felt, what her trusted friends all saw in her husband, and what she wanted. She describes a plan to close her company for a paid three-month Sabbath, the whole team resting from Memorial Day to Labor Day, drawn from the scripture about letting the fields rest every seven years. She’s little scared of the quiet, but she’s doing it anyway.
Candace and Annie close with several listener questions. The writer of Proverbs says the one who walks with the wise grows wise, and a companion of fools suffers harm, which Annie offers to a listener asking how to build healthy friendships. Another asks how to stay motivated to move her body through a long winter, and the answer is pretty obvious: schedule it, find a buddy, and do something rather than nothing. Through all of it runs the one line Annie keeps coming back to, the reason to loosen your grip on the thing you are scared of. You are still here. You still get to live this. Don't let that hold you back.
Sponsors mentioned in this episode:
316 Financial, bank316.com
CrowdHealth, joincrowdhealth.com, code Candace
International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, ifcj.org/candace
Grand Canyon University, gcu.edu
Nelló, drinknello.com, code Candace
Together community, candace.com/together