Sometimes you can just tell from the start what kind of day it’s going to be. This morning as I wrote in my journal, I could already feel a building sadness. “I will likely cry sometime today,” I predicted, “I feel it coming on…” And sure enough, later in the day, I indulged myself in a pretty decent cry. I do that from time to time and imagine that this trend will continue for a little while as I learn to roll with whatever life might send my way. I am learning to navigate here in the dark, where I can’t see the path in front of me further than a step or two. I am adapting to the not knowing, learning to trust some instinct that I’m headed in the “right” direction toward something good even though I have very little awareness of what that is. And, importantly, I am moving forward, taking action rather than plopping down in the middle of the darkness having given up and swearing to go no further.
All this is interesting, metaphorically speaking, but what does it mean in real life? Well, every day I get up with an intention of taking an action in some direction toward improving my lot in life. Sometimes, getting up in the morning is the action, but usually I do manage to accomplish a little bit more than that. Sometimes I take tiny baby steps and others are nice leaps forward, though I confess it’s been a while since I’ve taken a nice leap toward improving my life. I am perhaps overdue. So even though when I woke this morning I knew I would cry sometime today, and I did, I also managed to get a few things done–this blog being one of them, as it is every night. I am grateful to have this opportunity at the end of the day to see if I can honestly sum up what unfolded and approach it from the perspective of gratitude and appreciation. It isn’t always easy to do that, and sometimes what I write reflects the struggle to get something, anything out in the blogosphere. But however it turns out, it is an offering–to the faithful readers for sure, but more so to myself and for anyone “out there” whether they read this blog or not who is struggling to find ways of dealing with what life is throwing at them.
I am hard pressed to describe this phenomenon adequately, as it is just coming to me–this idea of an offering. I suddenly had a Catholic moment that took me back to my early childhood and the prayer, “Morning Offering.” I remember of the line, “I offer you my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day…” It includes a lot of other stuff which I no longer profess, but I resonate with the idea that whatever unfolds over the course of the day is something that can in a sense be offered back to God or the Universe or whomever one might wish to offer it to. It is a way of saying “Today I have done my best with what I was given. I am grateful for this day and all that happened in it, no matter what it was or how it looked or how it turned out. Tomorrow will provide me another opportunity.” And so it shall.
