Today I am simply grateful for the close of another week. They flash by with such speed these days there’s little else to do but be grateful for their closing. As often happens, this week presented me with a mixed bag of emotions from worry, anxiety, and sadness to calm, delight, and thoughtfulness and many emotional states in between. In that regard, it was a typical sevenday. Years from now I’ll go back and read this blog and my morning journals (which now number a few hundred pages) and shake my head at what I recorded of these days of my life drama. I will look back in gratitude at how I made it through a particularly rough patch while managing to maintain a semblance of sanity and steadiness. Because as shaky as I have felt over the past many months, at the core of my being I am rock steady and I know it. How I know it is somewhat irrelevant. What’s true is that I can feel it in my bones. And for that I am beyond grateful.
I am grateful for a lot of simple things tonight: like going to work today after having put in only a couple of hours for the entire week. Things had slowed down and there was little for me to do, so I wasn’t able to put in any hours. and when one doesn’t put in hours, one doesn’t get paid. So right at the end of the week on Friday–a day I don’t normally go in to work–I was able to put in a few hours of work and earn a little income. It was good to have something to work on and get back onto a project that had been nearing completion before circumstances beyond my control slowed the whole thing down eventually bringing it to a halt. So I was quite happy when the information that we’d been waiting for for nearly two weeks finally came in and I was able to resume the process of completing the project. And just when I was somewhat anxious about both of my projects beginning to draw to a close, it appears that a new project is coming up that will guarantee work for another period of time, perhaps another month or so.
As I’ve observed before, sometimes things have gotten incredibly tight and I haven’t known how I was going to do all that I needed to do. But every time I’ve needed something to meet an obligation or need, what I’ve needed has appeared. I am learning to relax and lean into the uncertainty of this current life and be alright with it. So far I seem to be able to do that. It hasn’t been easy, but nothing much has been these days. And I’m building the muscles of faith that will continue to strengthen as the weeks fly by.
On Monday I celebrated my 55th birthday. I’ve been around on the planet for a while. Yet, I feel very much like a work in progress. I definitely have wisdom of an elder to share with others about life on this path and yet I still feel like I’m in school learning some basic life lessons. I am learning to be patient with myself in the midst of all this, patient, calm, and gentle with myself. I am grateful for the lessons, even the painful ones because they all contribute to who I am becoming. They are the threads that weave their way throughout the tapestry of my life. I look forward to the day when I can look at the pattern and recognize the message in it. But until then I keep walking out my faith one step at a time.
