The other day, I found myself whispering a reassurance to myself that breaks through the surface of my consciousness every so often:

There’s a rightness in your present.

I first heard this turn of phrase two decades ago.  I was working in a local cafe as a cook and manager.  Every morning, I would wake up before the sun rose and bike to work, flick on the lights and the gravelly indie music my co-workers preferred, and start to chop vegetables for the soup of the day.

I had spent a lot of time at this cafe as a university student – prior to my tenure there as an employee.  A pre-med hopeful, I would memorize neuroanatomy texts to the din of theatre students planning their productions and English students writing essays and math students etching out problems in their notebooks.

My life took an unexpected turn in those post-graduation years.  I applied to get into medical school twice, and both times my qualifications fell just short of the application cut-off.  They were unfair circumstances and I probably could have advocated for myself differently if I had known how, but I also couldn’t help but see the whole thing as a kick in the pants from the universe.  I was being picked up from my intended life trajectory by the scruff of the neck and put down in a reality I didn’t recognize – or want.

Because the cafe was close to the medical school, sometimes former classmates who had been successful in their applications would come into the cafe.  I would serve them soup as they studied and rehashed what had happened in the gross anatomy lab that day.  I was embarrassed.  Sometimes I would tuck myself back into the kitchen, pretending that we needed more tomatoes sliced for sandwiches, until they left.

Jan was one of the regulars at the cafe while I worked there.  A woman in her middle years, she had brightly coloured round-rimmed glasses and always wore scarves.  She had gone back to school as a mature student, and came in almost every day to study.  One day, apropos of nothing, she looked at me and said:

“There’s a rightness in your present.”

Meaning there’s something right about what’s happening for you right now, even though it feels wrong to you.

When I thought of this phrase the other day, and considered sharing it with you, I met with some inner resistance:  nowadays, we don’t offer seemingly trite placations to near-strangers.  We acknowledge the complexity of people’s lives; we don’t bypass the tough stuff.  But also, nowadays, we have this mentality I’ve heard referred to as “what about me-ism,” which would argue that I shouldn’t say something like “there’s a rightness in your present” because what if there ISN’T a rightness in your present?  What if you’re tangled in a set of intractable life circumstances that are unjust and inhumane, with nothing right about them at all?

(Somewhat humorously, I’ve seen what about me-ism described as bean soup theory, whereby someone might see a recipe for bean soup and write to the recipe developer:  what if I can’t eat beans?  The moral of the story:  not everything is for you, and you get to decide what to read, eat and believe).

It’s with that sentiment that I offer you Jan’s wisdom, but only if it serves you:

There’s a rightness in your present.

Remembering this helped me back then, and then again over these recently-passed Christmas holidays, when I was starting to feel hemmed in after six weeks of caring for my daughter as she healed from her recent surgery, and another two weeks of being at home with two bored kids, trying to be the magic maker while filled with longing for an entire day, alone, in my house.  It helped me look for the rightness; it helped me remember that everything is temporary.

And so, at a time of year when we’re all being encouraged to change everything about our lives – to look for everything that is wrong – perhaps there is a rightness in your present.  Perhaps there is a rightness in your body just the way it is, in the kid who woke up too early, in the wrinkles on your face and your messy house and that pair of leggings you’ve worn holes through, just the way they are.