How to get your spark back.

(AKA: getting out of disappointment.)

I looked up the word ‘disappointment’ in the dictionary a few weeks ago and the definition not only blew me away but it also helped me finally achieve a dream I’ve had in the making for years. (I'll write about that later.)

Sounds like I’m making stuff up, but I’m not even exaggerating, learning the definition gave me a whole new way of looking at disappointment and helped me re-spark my hope again, so I wanted to share that reframe with you.

The word itself means to deprive of a position.

The prefix dis, means not, or the opposite of and the word appointed is from Old French apointer meaning ‘from a point to a point.’

So when we’re disappointed we’ve been deprived of a point in time.

A specific one.

One we thought was ours.

We’ve been removed from it, or it’s been removed from us.

Instead of disappointment being a vague, gross, never-ending feeling of blah it’s now become super specific:

“Oh my goodness. Yes. I thought that shiny, sparkly thing was my thing. My only thing. And I missed it. Or that other shiny point just never happened. And then there was that Big Shiny Thing I did have for a time but it blew up.”

Maybe you know that feeling too?

This one point hooks us in. This captivating point holds our hope, our spark and sometimes our sense of purpose. This point could be anything: a marriage, a friendship or relationship, a job, a business, an opportunity.

It’s a single point in time we look at and say to ourselves “but that was it”.

We rage, we grieve, we write (and then delete) a hundred messages to enact a sense of justice for the new future we’ve been given.

We end up living in a weird kind of hope, as though our claim to that point in time (however valid) is strong enough it could bring us back to it.

It stunts our future because we can’t see anything new as being a replacement for the point we thought was ours. The shame of losing it holds us captive and if we’re not careful its kept us in a holding pattern, circling the same point in time over and over.

Maybe we missed it because we made bad choices, or other people made bad choices, or it was stolen from us, or we weren’t paying attention, or it was never even ours…we just thought it should be.

It doesn’t matter why we were deprived of that point, only that we were.

We have no time machine. Doc Brown has not as yet turned up at my door with his crazy hair, his dog and his DeLorean.

Those points are gone.

However this definition helped me see that while disappointment is attached to a single point, a lifetime is made up of many, many points, right? That means there must be more ahead…

That wasn’t our only chance.

It might have been a big one, sure. But it’s not the only one for us because we’re still here.

We get to move forward into a future filled of new “points.”

And guess what?

We bring it all. Everything we worked for, grieved over and earned in those places of deep disappointment, we take it all into what’s ahead.

The future is full of these shiny points for the taking. Look at that.

We’re no longer dis-appointed.

We’re re-appointed.

Feel free to share this post with someone you know who could use some encouragement as they get their spark back.

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