I’ve been working on a chapter for my book that’s all about fantasy vs. Beauty.

In the chapter, I reference this profound story from Anne Lamott’s Some Assembly Required where she talks about her trip to India and her dream of seeing the sunrise over the Ganges from a river boat. The only snag was when they got to the Ganges pre-dawn, on their very last day in India, the entire river was socked in.

She writes:

“It was a thick, white pea-soup fog—a vichyssoise fog—and apparently we were not going to see any of the sights I’d assumed we would see, and in fact we had come here to see. But we saw something else: We saw how much better mystery shows up in fog, how much wilder and truer each holy moment is than any fantasy.”

I tend to love the fantasy, the uninterrupted ease and perfection of the fantasy. Beauty, on the other hand, can be hard-won and not often as glamorous as I’d like. “Beauty”–the real deal–can leave us saying, “I’ll take the fantasy, thanks.”

But, life hands us fog more than it hands us clear skies, I think. And we have to find a way to live in the fog, find meaning in it, find ourselves and God in it. Sometimes we have to find our way through it, instead of choosing the myriad of ways we try to escape it.

We have to intrinsically value the fog, even though it’s not as easy-breezy as we might prefer. We have to believe that the fog could offer gifts that the fantasy never could.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Why is it so hard for us to hold out for the Beauty? Why do we want to cut right to the fantasy? What have you learned in the fog that you would have never learned had life been perfect?

Thanks for your input!