We Cut The Things We Enjoyed

You read the confirmation screen twice.

It said the payment had been stopped. Which was what you had gone in there to do, and it had taken about ninety seconds, and there was nothing complicated about any of it.

And you read it again anyway, and then you sat there for a moment before you closed the laptop.

That was the fourth one this year.

There was the thing that came out on the fourth of the month. The class on Wednesday evenings. The paper. And now this one, and none of them were extravagant, and every one of them was a thing that made the week better in a way you could not put on a list.

The Wednesday one is the one that catches you.

Not because it was expensive. Because for two hours on a Wednesday you were somebody who did that, and there were people there who knew you as somebody who did that, and now Wednesday is an evening in the house like the others.

And when it came up, when your sister asked, you said it was fine. You said you were not really getting to it anyway. You said something about it being a good time to have a break from it.

None of which is true.

That is the subject of this article, and I am going to be very plain about what I will not do with it.

I am not going to tell you that you are better off without it.

Not that it was a distraction. Not that this is a season of stripping back that will turn out to be good for you. Not that you will look back and be grateful. I do not believe those things about your Wednesday, and if I said them I would be doing to you exactly what you did to your sister.

You lost something you liked. That is what happened, and it was a real loss, and the fact that it was the right decision does not make it not a loss.

Both of those are true at once and nobody ever lets you hold both.

A time to keep, and a time to cast away

There is a passage in Ecclesiastes that lists the seasons of a life, and it does something unusual with loss.

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away. (Ecclesiastes 3:6, King James Version)

A time to lose. A time to cast away.

Look at how those are placed. They are set right beside getting and keeping, in the same rhythm, with the same weight, as though losing were an ordinary part of a life rather than a failure in one.

And there is no comfort attached to either of them.

That is what I want you to notice, because it is unusual. The passage does not say a time to lose, but do not worry, because you will get it back. It does not say a time to cast away, which is really a hidden gain. It says there is a time to lose, and then it moves straight on to the next pair.

Losing is named, given its place in a life, and not explained away.

That is a kind of respect, and it is the thing you have not been given since Wednesday stopped. Everybody who has heard about it has immediately reached for the good side of it: at least you were not using it much, at least it frees up the evening, at least you can go back to it later.

Every one of those is an attempt to make the loss stop being a loss, and it leaves you standing there with a real feeling and nowhere to put it.

Scripture does not do that to you. It simply says: there is a time to cast away.

So you are in one. And you are allowed to know that it cost you something, without having to find the silver lining before you are permitted to speak.

Losing is given its own place in a life and never once explained away, and a real loss has never once needed a bright side attached to it. Ecclesiastes 3:6 sets casting away beside keeping with the same weight, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody sitting in front of a closed laptop.

Cheerfulness is not the same as being right

Here is the practical half, and it is about what you said to your sister.

You have been performing contentment about this, and it is costing you more than the thing you cut.

Every time somebody asks, you produce the light version: not getting to it anyway, good time for a break, honestly it is fine. And you say it well, and they believe you, and the conversation moves on.

And you go away from it slightly worse than you arrived, and you have not worked out why.

It is because a performance requires an audience and a performer, and you are both. Saying it was fine does not persuade the person you are talking to and then stop; it also lands on you, and what it tells you is that your actual feeling about Wednesday is not acceptable and needs to be hidden.

So the grief has nowhere to go, and a grief with nowhere to go does not evaporate. It goes underground and comes out sideways, usually as a low irritability on a particular evening of the week that you have not connected to anything.

And underneath the performance there is a fear, and it is worth naming. You are afraid that if you admit you miss it, you will sound ungrateful. Or that it will look like complaining about a decision you made yourself. Or that saying it out loud will make it harder to keep going.

None of those turn out to be true, and the last one is exactly backwards. Naming a loss is what makes it possible to carry it. It is the unnamed ones that get heavy.

The decision was right. It was the sensible thing and you would make it again. And you miss it, and both of those sentences can be true in the same mouth on the same day.

A decision can be right and still cost you something, and giving a thing up has never once had to be cheerful to be right. The written word names the time to lose and leaves it named, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been performing contentment for four months.

Say it out loud, and say that you miss it

So here is the assignment, and it is one sentence and you will want to soften it.

Name one thing you cut, out loud, and say that you miss it.

To your husband, to a friend, to God in the kitchen with nobody there. It does not matter who, and there is no requirement to have a conversation about it.

Say the sentence: I miss the Wednesday thing.

And then stop, and do not add anything.

That is where it will be hard, because everything in you will want to finish it properly. You will want to say but it was the right call. Or it is only a small thing. Or I know we had to. All of those are true and every one of them cancels the sentence you just said, and canceling it is what you have been doing since it stopped.

Say the four words and let them stand in the room.

And here is what happens, and it is small and it is worth the discomfort. Nothing collapses. Nobody thinks you are ungrateful. Whoever you say it to will almost certainly say something like: I know, me too. And you will find that they have been performing as well, in the same house, about the same thing, for exactly the same reason.

And do not do anything about it. This assignment does not end in getting it back. There is no plan here to reinstate the Wednesday class, and I am not going to pretend to know whether that is possible.

Name it, and let it be a loss out loud, once.

You are able to say you miss it and let the sentence stand, and naming a loss has never once made it harder to carry. Ecclesiastes 3:6 says a time to keep, and a time to cast away, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a kitchen where somebody has just said four words and stopped.