I am grateful that the mercies of god are new every morning. No matter what kind of day I’ve had, no matter how challenging, exhausting, painful, sad or wonderful, joyous, amazing, remarkable, each day begins fresh each morning. This is a good thing. Sometimes I am so tired at the end of a day that it’s all I can do to put together coherent sentences for this blog and crawl into bed. But barring unforeseen circumstances, when I wake up the next morning there they are–a new set of mercies waiting for me. Thank goodness.
Tonight is one of those evenings when I am pretty tired. As usual I hauled a bunch of files and papers home with me from work with every intention of looking at them and preparing for an important meeting tomorrow afternoon, but as often happens, I am too tired to do much with them. I have done some thinking about what I hope to cover, which is often a good thing. But I didn’t pull out all my papers and such and do anything with them. I’ll start back on it tomorrow morning when I have a fresh set of mercies to work from.
Humans can be so driven by accomplishment. The other day I wrote about my not having crossed much off of my to-do list and asking myself if I felt bad about that. What a question! Sometimes we are so goal and accomplishment-oriented that we scarcely pay attention to much else. I come from a family of overachievers. Each of us–my siblings and I–in a variety of ways were pushed to achieve and excel academically and professionally. Our parents–Mom in particular, at least in my case–stayed on us to get good grades and pushed us in the direction of academic endeavors beyond what we would likely have pursued for ourselves. I would probably not have pursued and attained my Ph.D. had my mother not strongly encouraged me to go after it. And while it has proven to be a good thing to have it, I also felt I lost something in the pursuit of the degree. I was doing it more for someone else, for my mother, and less for myself.
Accomplishments are good, achievement is good, as long as they are in balance with other areas of our lives. I am grateful for what I have managed to accomplish professionally in my life, and I am equally grateful for for all the things that enrich my life immeasurably but have no particular practical value. I taught myself how to play the guitar and learned how to put words and music together to write songs. While this has served to entertain and inspire a reasonable number of people over the years, it probably won’t go down as my single most important achievement. And yet, the pure joy that playing and singing and entertaining people has given me over the years has been priceless. There are other examples like this where small accomplishments paid big dividends often in ways that are difficult to measure but important nonetheless.
I am grateful that I have reached an age where accomplishment is weighted very differently than it was when I was younger. It’s not that people no longer expect great accomplishments from me; it’s more that those things are less important to me than they once were. I no longer bend under the pressure to achieve great things. I am satisfied within myself at what I have done with my life. There are things I still hope to accomplish, other hills to climb so to speak. But I am grateful for who I am and where I am and what I’ve done up to this point in my life. That is a very good thing.
