Some time ago I had a conversation with an acquaintance of mine who grew up (like me) in Central Florida. Among her few complaints about life in the Pacific Northwest was the fact that she missed feeling the heat of the sun upon her skin. If one wants frequent sunlight, one can go to the High Desert, which is only a few hours away, but alas, the sunlight there does not come with a great deal of heat. I have known other people who likewise find the heat from the sunlight to be essential to living happily, although I must admit with my own uneven melanin production, I have never particularly enjoyed direct light and heat myself, being far more fond of indirect light, which is less blinding and less likely to give me unwanted sunburns because I cannot handle the heat of the sun full-on. Nevertheless, I too can understand the enjoyment one gets from seeing light after a long experience of living under dark clouds and in the shadow.

A few years ago I had pondered writing an extended narrative, perhaps even a memoir, about a certain era of my life. As I moved from college into young adulthood, I started musing a great deal on where I belonged in the larger world. Being a complicated person, with fairly severe sensitivities, has made it a bit of a difficult process to find a place in the sun in certain parts of life. My own life became sufficiently dark after I had conceived the idea that I decided not to write about it at length, as it was too painful to do so. This is not to say that I stopped puzzling over the questions in my head, but rather that some things are impossible to write about for a concentrated period of time or at length, but must be addressed little by little, so that they can be borne at all. I imagine I am not the only one who feels this way, but all the same it is something that is very true about me, that what is darkest must be dealt with a little bit at a time.

In his 1951 poem “Harlem,” Langston Hughes asked: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” In life, we may often fight for a place in the sun, seek after our own selfish ambition, only to realize belatedly that not everything was created for the harsh sunlight. Some people are made alive by the white heat of a spotlight; others wilt under the glare. Symbolically speaking, of course, to seek a place in the sun is to seek places where we may succeed, where we fit, where we belong, where we may receive the honor and respect that we are due. This is far from a straightforward task. The playwright Lorraine Hansberry, for example, wrote a famous play called “A Raisin In The Sun” that mirrored her experiences as a child being a black child in a hostile white neighborhood where her father fought against the restrictive covenants that kept blacks out of the best Chicago neighborhoods of the time. Yet as a teenager I grew up as the only white kid in a black neighborhood built over a reclaimed garbage dump wondering why all the bad neighborhoods in Tampa seemed to refer to heights or highlands as part of their name, while the lowlands near the river or especially the various bays in the area were much more highly sought after despite the dangers of flooding and storm tides. Life is strange.

What is it that we want in life? Much of what we want in life is not within our power to demand, because we are dealing with other beings possessed as we are of free moral agency, who can choose to give and choose not to give what we are looking for. To be sure, we want to be able to sleep at night in peace and with a certain amount of dignity and self-respect, but even this may not be within our power to accomplish. Certainly the love and respect we want from others, the opportunities for success and honor, and so on, depend on other people. Even our own efforts to better our lives may be greatly benefited or hindered by others. Very often, our success depends on the abilities that we have to enable the larger success of others. We exist in complicated networks, where our skills and abilities may be liabilities to understanding the capabilities of others we deal with, where our weaknesses and vulnerabilities can be a source of empathy and understanding, and where even our discontent can be a spur to growth and progress. Yet so much of what we long for is far more complicated than we wish it to be, and fulfilling our deepest desires can be a far more difficult process than we imagine. Small wonder there is so much shadow, and so little lightness, in so much of what we do. At least we can treasure those moments of lightness and joy when they occur, even if we would want to enjoy them far more often than we do.