Tonight I started out on a completely different subject and came to a screeching halt, deciding to go a different way. It happens periodically. That’s why one of the little things I am grateful for with the advance of technology is the ability to save the document should I ever care to come back to that subject matter, or I can use the delete key, as I often do when I start writing something that doesn’t come out quite right. It’s quite a bit different from when I was working on my master’s thesis that I had typed by hand. Yes folks, that was before computers. I paid one dollar per page and $1.25 per pages with tables or charts. The woman who typed it did so on an IBM selectric typewriter. You can imagine then that when a mistake was found or when I had to make edits on my thesis, she had to type whole sections over again. There was no deleting and inserting lines, etc. And let me tell you the correcting selectric was state of the art at it’s time–it even had a correction key. Wow! Ten years later I was typing my own doctoral dissertation on my Mac computer. Making changes then were significantly easier, even though that was before the days of the internet (remember Mosaic and the World Wide Web?) and research was still done in the library. Oy, the dinosaur age.
I am grateful for the technology that allows me to easily write and rearrange and post pictures and YouTube videos in this blog. But with all the tools I have at my disposal, I am still at the mercy of my muse; whether I am clicking away on my laptop keyboard or writing longhand with pen and paper, the words still come from me. Tonight I exercised the power to change my mind and alter my trajectory. I didn’t like the tone of the the first blog I was drafting. It had a bit of an edge to it that I didn’t like and wasn’t feeling. Well I was feeling the edge but felt like it wasn’t what I wanted to share. A gratitude blog should be just that, a sharing, a telling of the stories of things I am grateful for, the whys and wherefores. It is not a space for being cranky. I hear the voice of my mother in the back of my head, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.” Since some days not saying anything isn’t an option–particularly for a daily blog–that leaves it to me to alter my frame and shift the energy and the trajectory of the piece.
Tonight I am grateful for the power that rests in my hands, the power to do and speak of good things. It does not mean that things are always fun and easy and happy, things can be tough. But each day, in each moment really, I make a choice about how I am going to approach the tough as well as the easy, the sad as well as the joyful, the simple as well as the complex. Some days I might not have it in me to write a totally upbeat and positive blog, but most days I will. Because no matter how hard a day has been (and yesterday, for example, was hard) I still control whether or not I’m still standing strong and unbroken at the end of it. It’s good to know I still got it. And when I feel a sense of fear or worry come over me, I repeat the assurance from Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” May it be so!
