I’ve spent the five days since Tuesday trying to come to terms with what happened in the election, but now I’m not so sure it was such a wonderful use of my time. This idea of “processing” is the intellectual equivalent of the rationalizing I do on a daily basis.

That rationalizing is what allows me, for example, to take several extra coffee breaks during the work day, and extend them well beyond the usual time allotted for such breaks, and then use that time to catch up on what’s happening on General Hospital. Or reading those coming-of-age novels I enjoy so much (probably because I’ve never felt as if I quite grew up myself).

The act of processing (that is, the process) hasn’t gained me much insight, other than a swirling maelstrom of explanations that I’ve picked up here and there. With the hindsight of nearly a week, I can see now that it wasn’t an explanation that I was really looking for. It was something else. It was validation.

The truth is, I didn’t exactly find it. I found plenty of people who agreed with me about what they thought should have happened, and I found loads of explanations about what people thought did happen. But the more I read, the clearer I hear that voice telling me I don’t know the answer. Probably there is no single answer, and I’ve already run through all the partial ones, so it’s time to move on.

That’s easier said than done, though, isn’t it? When high expectations are shattered, you want to know why. You feel betrayed, and you want to find a way to aim the blame so it splatters on the guilty without sullying you and your friends, even if you share that blame.

It’s a little like losing the Super Bowl or the World Series; it doesn’t matter how close you came, if victory slipped away. It’s like a failed love affair, or a bankrupt business venture. The post mortems can be more devastating than the defeat, almost paralyzing. You sort through the facts, glean whatever helpful hints you can, and apply that knowledge to the rest of your life. What you don’t do is turn the process of processing into the rest of your life.

The election is over. The history of the world is not. Hope and opportunity have kept us going through darker times than this, when hope was dimmer and opportunity less accessible. We haven’t come through six billion years of evolution to slither back into the ooze, and we haven’t survived the last four years to hand our fate over to anyone.

Maybe that sounds like rationalizing to you. To me it’s the beginning of a new process, one that looks ahead more than backward. (Which is pretty much what I’ve been trying to tell myself for the last five days anyway.)