Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I think about my dad driving his car to and from his job at the airport. Dad worked the night shift for many years when I was a child, helping weary travelers along their way.

There’s something about the idea of my dad just showing up and being in his place each and every night that comforts me. Maybe that’s all that’s really required in life — just showing up over and over again. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

Sometimes I long for a time in the past that seemed simpler — when I feel like less was required of me, the world was a different way, when people I loved were still alive or when relationships or trusts that are now broken were still whole. Holidays can really bring out those longings.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to be fully present and grateful for life and yet long for things to be different. Is it immature of me to sometimes wish I was 10 years old again, falling asleep under the Christmas tree, waiting to be surprised by what the morning might bring, as opposed to being the adult who knows exactly what’s inside every package?

Is it small-minded for a friend going through an unwanted divorce to feel anger and betrayal during these holiday months instead of a sense of abundance about all the wonderful things in life?

Is it disrespectful of life for an elderly person, who’s had great fortune to live so long, to say “the best is behind me, and I’d rather be done with this world?”

Maybe it’s not a requirement to be happy, grateful or optimistic all of the time. Maybe life really is as simple as showing up to face the strange mixture of our memories, our hopes, our dreams and our disasters-over and over again.

Life is so many things all at the same time. Sometimes it’s impossible to feel just one way about it. In the same world where our president carelessly says every word that comes to his mind, carefully constructed poems line the walls of buses like precious gems. In the same world where Congress seems intent on dismantling the social safety net, a little boy walks out of a Starbucks at 2nd and Yesler handing a homeless man breakfast with the solemnity of a sacred ritual.

In the same world where women expose cultures of sexual violation, a man at 3rd and Pine wearing a soft green sweater turns and gives his wife a tender kiss. In the same world where tiki torches light the faces of angry young men, candles light the face of a friend’s young daughter as she sings Leonard Cohen’s “Alleluia.”

And no matter what’s happening in the world at large, when I round the corner to my road, a big fluffy white dog named Winter greets me at a farmstand lit up with little white lights. There were dahlias and tomatoes there well into November and evergreen wreaths will be coming soon.

Maybe we can somehow show up for it all— the heartache of what’s been lost and the beauty of the small gestures that light up our days. Maybe we can open ourselves all the way up to the abundance of the contradiction and the mess of it.

Maybe we can do our best to help other weary travelers along the way. Maybe, just maybe, that could be enough.

— Elizabeth Fitterer has lived on Vashon for 12 years and is a board member of the Puget Sound Zen Center.