What To Do

Okay, here’s another of those beautiful parts of the Narnia books, another of the parts that makes me love these books more and more over the years:

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later and then you still have to decide what to do.
– C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
You can put “being angry” in the place of “crying” and – same thing. My grandmother used to say similar things. A long time ago, when one of my brothers was having a hard time with his life, dealing with addiction and divorce and some other heavy problems, and he said something to her about how rough things were. I can’t say she was sympathetic, except she was; the woman went through one world of hell in her lifetime. But what she said was “At some point, you have to put your pants on and go outside.”
To me, they’re similar sentiments: you still have to decide what to do.