This evening I find myself once again in the interesting space of uncertainty. I want to zero in on what I am feeling to be better able to articulate it and yet I can feel I am not quite there yet. It’s interesting to be once again standing on the edge of awareness but not quite grasping what it is. I am once again
When the unexpected tsunami of drama rushed through my life nearly four years ago I didn’t know what hit me. As I was thinking about it a bit ago I decided I could not use the terminology that I “hit rock bottom.” Times were difficult, yes, and incredibly painful, but they were not catastrophic. And perhaps it sounds terribly corny in some philosophical sense, but more than anything I view that time and its aftermath as an time of learning and growth. Even at the time I realized that how I responded to the challenges life had presented me would tell me a lot about who I was, what I was made of, and how my life would progress. Rather than succumb to depression and somewhat understandable anxiety about what would “happen to me,” I focused on taking proactive, affirmative steps to move my life forward. This blog emerged from one of those steps.
I am grateful for the clarity that I’ve been seeking slowly (verrrrryyyyy slowwwwlllyyyy) coming into being. When I began writing my daily journal (around the same time as I began writing my daily gratitude blog), I named the journal “writing my way to clarity.” The intention behind it was to spend time processing through writing things that I hoped would become clearer as I wrote. This week I will begin on “Book 14.” That’s a lot of writing, though perhaps not a lot of clarity yet. Clarity for me is more about a gradual dawning than it is a sudden revelation. I am slowly becoming aware of movement in a particular direction and am realizing that I set this particular course some time ago without really even realizing it.
There is an interesting thing that happens when you pray and ask for something to happen. You have to be open to what shows up rather than having a preconceived idea of what the answer will look like. I have set some intentions, backed them with particular spiritual practices of prayer, fasting, and giving thanks. I have talked to god, declaring that something needed to change in my life, that I needed something to happen to move me along, that I needed clarity. Answers show up in the oddest places, sometimes coming out of the blue from a direction I was not expecting. Nevertheless, they are answers. And if I am lucky I am smart enough to recognize them as such. Even when the tsunami of drama swept through my life, there were answers in it. It cleared out places in my life where I was stuck, creating room for what needed to happen in my life next. I know that now, and even while I was recovering from the shock and pain of it all could see in part why it had to happen the way it did.
Life has not been easy, but it has been good. I have shed tears of anguish, pain, anger, frustration, depression and I have struggled to understand what was happening and why. But I also expressed gratitude for my life in the midst of the drama, and learned from it all. I would not trade it or take it back for the learning I gained from it. And while I’ve often said it would be great to have a quieter, smoother life with a few less lessons to be learned, I’ll take what comes as it comes and do my best. At the end of the day that’s all I can do anyway. And so it goes.
