Today it took me over two hours to drive home from work (on an average day the drive home takes 55 to 75 minutes.) I left at a little after 4:00 p.m. and got home after 6. To say that traffic crawled would be an understatement. I am grateful to have made it home in a relatively calm frame of mind. I am incredibly, amazingly, almost indescribably tired. I have spun the wheel twice already. I might spin it again for good measure, then I will select a posting and repost it. I could also go with simple gratitude today, and keep writing original text, but again, tiredness wins out and I will stick with the wheel and see where it takes me.
I’ve said this before, but one of the things I am grateful for comes in the re-reading of blogs I posted a year or two ago. Tonight as I spun the wheel, deciding which post to potentially repost, I was sent to Day 21. It was good to read where my head was on day 21, back in July of 2011 at the start of this odyssey that has now stretched over two years and 790 blogs. I also ran across another good posting. But it was this post from early August of last year that captured my attention for this evening. Re-reading day 388 from August 5, 2012 reminded me of the importance of faith and perseverance in the face of intense pressure and deep uncertainty. It deepens my gratitude for all that I’ve learned on the journey of the last few years and how those lessons in gratitude are the gifts that keep on giving. Enjoy this post from last August:
Push, push, push. That is how to keep moving, keep going, keep working, keep pressing on. That’s what I did today. Today has been a relatively productive day, though from looking around me I can’t fully tell what I’ve accomplished. Perhaps enough, perhaps not enough. We shall see. I am hitting crunch time right about now. There is a strong likelihood–actually a certainty–that I am moving locations within the next few weeks. My son has found another place to live and I need to do the same. I have been pursuing job opportunities out of state and have been waiting to hear the outcome of my most recent conversations with potential employers. But one way or another, regardless of what happens with my outstanding job prospects, I am leaving my current abode. It could still be in the Bay area or it could be back East somewhere. At the moment, I am not at all sure. My life hasn’t been this up in the air since I was in my mid 20s and facing an uncertain housing situation. Where I ended up living changed the course of my life for the next 10 years, but that is not today’s story. That is for another time.
I am grateful this evening for faith–for the belief that something positive is going to happen even though I can’t see what or how or when. Somehow I have faith that things are going to work out positively for me and that everything really will be alright. Sometimes I have very little basis for this belief, but I hold onto it nonetheless and for the most part it has proven to be true. Things have been challenging and at times incredibly stressful over the past several months, but somehow I am still standing strong. As I wrote in last night’s blog, I cry almost every day–not stormy, deep, sobbing cries, but more like brief, gentle, spring shower, kind of crying. Life is stressful to be sure, but that hasn’t prevented me from seeing beauty all around me, finding the good in the vast majority of situations I face, or having faith that, even in the midst of the struggle and drama and challenge, everything is nevertheless going to be alright.
I am not a theologian and it is not my intention to “preach” about faith; there are many in the blogosphere who already do that way better than I could. And the faith I speak of is not necessarily about religious doctrine or dogma. It’s much more basic than that. To me the fact that I have faith–both in myself and some greater essence or divine spark or something greater than my individual self–is sort of a miracle in and of itself. It is something I cannot explain, where it is or where it came from and why it persists when perhaps other folks would have given up on it. That to me is the mystery of faith: there’s no particularly good reason for some of us to have faith, and yet we do. I wish I could explain this better, but the words are failing me, as often happens when trying to describe concepts like faith to another person. It can be such a personal thing, how can it be put into words another person can comprehend? And yet, that too happens. People have common indescribable experiences–they don’t know how to talk about it, but they don’t need to because others have their own experiences with faith. So if I am not making sense I apologize.
I don’t know where it comes from but I am sure grateful for it. It keeps me going on days when it feels like there’s no reason to take another single step. No, I may not be able to describe it, but I know it’s there. It may not make sense to someone, but it needs only to make sense to me. I by no means have the whole faith thing down perfectly, but even that doesn’t seem to matter. Just believe, my spirit reminds me. Everything’s going to be alright. And so it shall.
