Lost Be the Day

This year has been heavy.

Grief. Anger. A news feed I can barely look at some mornings. Cruelty is on full display, and some people applaud it.

It adds to the heaviness, landing on grief I was already carrying. I have lost people I love, and that grief doesn’t step aside when the news gets worse. It stacks on top.

Lately I keep returning to a passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the chapter “Old and New Tables” (Thomas Common’s translation):

“And lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced. And false be every truth which hath not had laughter along with it!”

Lines like these have been used to tell people to cheer up, look on the bright side, find gratitude. I’m not using them that way, and I don’t think Nietzsche was either. He wrote them while chronically ill, mostly alone, with almost no readers. He knew heaviness well.

Look at the word “measure.” A measure is a single bar of music, and in older English, to tread a measure meant to dance. Either way, the unit is small. One bar. Some laughter along the way.

A day can be mostly grief, mostly rage, mostly dread, and still count. You don’t have to feel better first. You don’t need to be grateful. The bar is low on purpose, and that is what makes it usable.

A dance will not bring back the people I’ve lost.

A laugh will not stop the cruelty.

Neither one will fix what is broken in the world right now.

Here is what they do. They remind me I’m still in my body. They remind me the day was at least a little bit mine.

The second line is the part I keep chewing on. A truth that came with no laughter at all deserves suspicion. Laughing takes a little distance. People who can laugh at an idea, even one they love, are not clinging to it out of fear or pride. And laughing at cruelty, at pomposity, at anyone who wants us smaller, is a way of refusing to be flattened. That laughter can have teeth.

Here is what a measure looks like for me lately:

• A dance in the morning, while the coffee brews.

• A group text where someone says something ridiculous at exactly the right moment.

• Time on the pickleball court where I forget everything else.

• Laughing at something absurd in the news instead of only dreading it.

So here is my pledge for the hard days:

Feel all of it.

Let the grief be as big as it is.

Let the anger have its say.

Keep looking at what is happening.

And at least once, move.

At least once, laugh.

If you are carrying something heavy right now, I won’t tell you to lighten up. Count the day by one dance and one laugh. Everything else can be as heavy as it needs to be.

What was your one dance, your one laugh this week?