I am thankful for another day of life. Today I’ve smiled, I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, I’ve pondered the meaning of things. I crossed something off of my to-do list that’s been on there for a while–I bathed the dog (and I mean her hair was everywhere!) These days I measure accomplishments a little differently than I have in the past. They are way less grand than they used to be and it seems to take me longer to get things done than it “should.” But, things take as long as it take and I’m not judging myself about it.
Sometimes it requires a lot of work to not judge myself. Like many other people I allow myself to get trapped in the “shoulds”–all those things that nag at us on a never-ending basis. Lives spent dealing with the shoulds are often lives of regret, because of what we should have done or how we should have behaved, etc. Well, by some standards I should have gotten a lot more done today than I did, but I realize that no one was keeping score on any of that but me. And today I am choosing to let it go.
There’s a picture of my dad where he’s looking into the camera and saluting. I have it propped up right where I can see it from my bed. He’s old in the picture–in his eighties I reckon, and dressed in a suit and tie, not a uniform. I keep it where I can see it because it reminds me to “soldier on.” There are days when I salute him back and let him know that even when things come along and knock me down, I get up and soldier on. On other days I look at the picture and say to him, “Not right now, not this moment. I don’t feel like soldiering on no matter what. I’m gonna sit here and feel like crap for a few minutes.” And it’s usually not much longer than a few minutes because, whether I like it or not, the soldiering on instinct runs too strong in me for me to linger in whatever I’m going through in the moment.
I’m grateful that at the end of the day I can salute my Dad and know that I made it through another day with some measure of of grace. I look forward to stringing together a whole day, then two days in a row, then a whole week when I feel truly great and like I’m making the kind of difference in the world that I know I can. Until then, I’ll soldier on and be grateful.
