Tonight I am resting myself, oh so grateful that it is Saturday. I have found myself drowsing in front of the television that was playing a college football game, my computer on my lap with several open emails in various stages of being written and sent. I must confess that I am happy that we are approaching autumn. Not only is it my favorite season of the year, but as a football fan it signals the return of my favorite athletic season. I have been a football fan for as long as I can remember. I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and on a clear day I could hear the sounds from the Notre Dame football stadium, and every Sunday in the fall you could count on most of my family gathered in the living room or family room watching the Chicago Bears. College football started last Saturday and professional football began on Thursday, but begins in earnest tomorrow (Sunday), and I am a happy camper. I don’t really want to say that I am grateful for football season to be underway: that seems a little frivolous given the usual subject matter of this blog. Let me simply say that I am pleased.
Lately I have been writing fresh blogs; Thalia the muse puts in regular appearances. Today, however, given the lateness of the hour at which I am completing this blog (it’s after 11 p.m. EST here), I decided to spin the wheel and offer a portion of a blog from a previous blog. As often happens when I spin the wheel, I land on a number of entries and read through them trying to decide which one I’m going to use in a given night. Tonight as I was searching through past blogs I was moved by the hope and optimism I read in some of the posts as well as empathizing with the struggles with fear and depression I was feeling, particularly in the early days. I read blogs from August and October of 2011 in which I was expressing the concern that at five and seven months (respectively) of unemployment perhaps I would not find a job as easily as I’d hoped. Little did I know as I was writing those posts that I would go nearly 18 months without full-time employment. The anxiety and fear of those days truly tested my resolve to continue seeking and writing about what was good in my life.
I am grateful to have made it through a fairly challenging time in my life and even more grateful to have this blog and my morning journal to chronicle the journey I’ve been on over the past two-plus years. It gives me a measuring tape by which I can track and measure my progress from where I was to where I am right now. So I spun the wheel a few times tonight and landed on a post from August 2012 from which I’d like to share the following excerpt about living in the moment. Enjoy!
I am grateful for the times when I am truly living in the moment. I am focused on what is immediately in front of me, not fretting over all that I did or didn’t do in the past or freaking out about all the things that could happen in the future. Yes, I have things I wish I had done or said differently, times I’d behaved differently, but that was then and I already did what I did, said what I said, and acted how I acted. It’s a done deal. And while I have a number of things I need to do and have happen on my behalf in the days and weeks ahead, there’s little I can do in this moment except to continue to plan and prepare as best I can without being deeply attached to the outcome. Things can change in the blink of an eye, throwing all that careful planning and preparation completely out of whack. So it is useless and in fact quite harmful to expend a lot of energy fretting about what’s going to happen next week, when I really should have my attention and energy on what’s in front of me at the moment. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
This all sounds well and good, but it is a lot of work and I’d say I’m only moderately successful at achieving this state of enlightenment. I have moments of freak out nearly every day; it’s not about not having them, it’s about knowing how to handle it when you do have them. I talked about this a bit in yesterday’s blog when I wrote about the drill sergeant and the teacher–the motivator and the nurturer. Whatever comes up in the moment, I try to work with it–breathe through it, assure myself that I am not going to die and that everything in fact is going to be alright, calm myself down, and then get on with whatever I was doing when the freakout first interrupted the orderly flow of life. I am not an expert at it, but it is a muscle I plan to keep exercising until it gets well-defined and strong. And given some of the questions I am facing about my future I’ll have plenty of opportunity to exercise. Still, I am grateful for the moments of calm that I have in the midst of the craziness. In those moments I remember that life is good, it is sweet, and there is much to be grateful for.
