Today has brought the cool symmetrical day–day 777–when I contemplated bringing about the cessation of writing this blog every day. My guess is that I’ll get up tomorrow, or hit the 8:00 o’clock in the evening hour and the urge to log into WordPress will come over me and before I realized I had intended to stop writing I will find myself a paragraph into the evening’s blog. Anyway, my sister has encouraged me to keep writing until I reach day 800, which is a nice round century mark. A perverse side of me wants to stop on day 792 or some other random number, but even that is sort of arbitrary and silly. The truth is, when one has done something nearly every evening for 776 days, it’s kind of hard to think about not doing it anymore.
I am tired this evening, my friends. That is not unusual. Many nights over the two and a half years that I’ve been writing this blog I have been tired. I have been scared. I have been lonely. The thread that is woven throughout these 776 days has been that through it all I have been grateful. No matter how bad things felt: financial distress, emotional meltdowns, depression, grief and anxiety. I experienced the gamut of emotions through the thick of the drama in 2011. But no matter how challenged I felt, those days I wanted to crawl into my cave and stay there, when I really wanted to give up but had no idea what giving up even looked like, I dragged myself up searched for the blessings that were present even in the midst of it all, and wrote of my gratefulness.
Today has felt mildly challenging; there are just going to be days like this, and while I don’t enjoy them, I also know they don’t last and their impact on me is much less than they used to be. I am grateful for simple things tonight. Among them, the willingness to find the goodness, to search for and find the humor in various situations. When everything seems to be going nuts around me, I am grateful that I find things to laugh about, the more ridiculous the better. Sometimes I run across something so funny that I’ll watch it repeatedly, howling until tears pour out of my eyes and run down my face. Other times, I’ll find something that is so poignant that the tears that pour from my eyes are because some person’s random act of kindness or humanity is spotlighted and put on display before the world. Tears are agents of release for me: heartaches and pains that I didn’t know I was carrying get released through tears of laughter as well as tears of sorrow. I am grateful for them both.
I have much to be grateful for, many accomplishments to celebrate, battles won, obstacles overcome. These days when I run into a little hiccup in something I’m trying to do, I try not to get too bent out of shape about it. There’s a benefit from having lived through truly difficult days–given all the challenges I faced a few years ago, I am much less fearful about what could happen than I used to be and the issues that bother me are minimal. No matter how challenging things are from time to time in my current life, I’m grateful for where I am right now on this day, in this moment.
I have no idea right now where I’m going to take this blog in the days and weeks ahead. I’m simply going to allow it to unfold as it will and see where it takes us all. I know that sometimes these 500-plus words turn out to be just the thing that someone needed to hear, and that is why I keep writing. That and because sometimes these 500-plus words turn out to be just the thing I needed to hear myself say. And for that I remain exceedingly grateful.
