Tonight was a good one to spin the wheel. I’m worn having traveled early this morning to take care of some business and visit with friends this weekend. When I spun the wheel, I landed on a post about resilience and my gratitude for having the capacity to bounce back when things get tough. Please enjoy this post (day 465) from October 2012.
Sometimes in the midst of struggle it can be difficult to form and write words that express positive attributes like gratitude, resolve, understanding, commitment, equanimity, peace, etc. Things happen that make you ask, “Seriously?” Or something happens to you in which you find yourself on the receiving end of something so terribly unfair, unjust, or just plain wrong that you cannot find or form words to voice your anger, the sense of helplessness,the inability to say or do anything that can make right something that has gone terribly wrong. And yet, somehow in the midst of all of this drama, you must find a way through it to the gratitude, the understanding, equanimous space that resides at the center of your self. I’ve exercised that particular muscle a lot over the past 18 months and am relieved and grateful to find it present and strong as ever.
The fact is that life is frequently unfair. People are unkind, unethical, uncaring, un-lots of things, and we find their behavior baffling at best, hurtful and devastating at worst. We are constantly bombarded by all kinds of icky stuff that life throws at us that leaves us gasping for breath and shaking our heads (and sometimes our fists) at the heavens asking why. We may feel as if we’re minding our own business, trying to be a good person, doing the best we can with what we have, living as honorable a life as we can, when WHAMMO! something suddenly comes along and flattens us. Even as I type this I have to smile and shake my head. The image of Wile E Coyote popped into my head as a safe or a piano or a huge rock hurtles down toward him and as he sees it coming he does something ridiculously ineffectual like opening an umbrella to cover himself from the impending calamity.
In 465 days of writing this blog I have commented many times that even at some of the most challenging circumstances and on the most difficult days, there is always, always (always) something to be grateful for, something, some one thing that I can look to to provide that spark of light that reminds me that no matter what is going on, no matter how hard some things are I can find something good, something beautiful. Today I spent some time with two of my sisters. That in and of itself is a gift and a blessing to me. While I was chatting with one sister I got some difficult news that I didn’t react particularly well to (I had to apologize to her more than once for my liberal use of foul language) and later in the day while talking with the other sister I received another piece of information that likewise sent me tumbling over the edge. (I need to put about $2.00 in my “swear jar.”) I didn’t manage either thing particularly well and while I’d like to say I am over both matters, I still am struggling a bit with them. They will likely continue to sting for a day or two. But in the scheme of things, neither of these things are terribly important. I will likely be over them relatively quickly.
I am grateful tonight for resilience,that wonderful ability to bounce back. I think I must have some synthetic material in my DNA by now, I’ve had to bounce back so much. Over the course of my lifetime, many difficult things have happened and I am alive and relatively well and can not only talk about them coherently and calmly, but can also understand why they happened, and why in some cases they had to happen in order to help me grow and move along toward becoming the person I am right now. Many of these experiences were difficult and painful, and at the time I could not see how I was going to make it through, how I would ever feel good again. But I did heal, I was able to pull myself together and move on.
This evening as I walked my sister out to her car, I looked up and noticed the moon hanging over the house and the twinkling of stars as the evening darkened into nighttime. We both stopped and commented on how beautiful it was. I realized that it’s the first glimpse I’ve had at the moon since I arrived here three weeks ago. It’s a quarter moon with a full moon to follow soon. I’ve been a stargazer, a wannabe astronomer my whole life and have loved gazing at the moon. For a moment, standing there at my sister’s car staring up into the cosmos,all the angst of the earlier part of the day melted away. “Go write your blog,” my sister told me as she prepared to leave,“Write about how beautiful the moon is this evening.” And so I am. Mama said there’ll be days like this, oh yes she did. The good news is that they pass. Tomorrow morning I start with a new set of downs so to speak (sorry for the football metaphor…) I will awaken to a new day, new possibilities. And for that, I continue to be grateful.
