Tonight signing into this blog site was a bit like walking into a room you haven’t been inside of in a long time. “Is this how I left this?” I ask myself, looking around at the vaguely familiar layout of the place. “This is a really cool room. I used to do a lot of fun things in here.” A funny thing happened during my hiatus from writing my daily gratitude blog–I lost some of the power that had come from focusing each day on one or more blessings I am grateful for. I still expressed gratitude in some form many times a day; but I definitely lost something when I fell out of the habit of taking this time of deliberate focus on gratitude. It’s going to take me some effort to reestablish the momentum I’d gained from writing every day for nearly eight months. I imagine that the wall I hit a few weeks ago when I’d written the last blog before my hiatus will still pop up in front of me from time to time. And, as I did so many times on those days, I’ll push through and find a way to say what I am grateful for that day. Right now I am simply grateful to be back thinking and writing about gratitude.
I am grateful this evening for this walk of faith that I’m on at the moment. The fog of uncertainty that has characterized much of the past year is at times as dense as it’s been since the early months of 2011 when the rug got pulled out from under me. But then there are those brief glimmers of clarity, not so much about what I’m “supposed” to be doing with my life, but clarity that it’s somehow alright not to know and that I’ll know what I need to know when I need to know it. And until then I just keep walking forward doing the best I can with what’s in front of me. Now THAT, folks is faith.
Yet there have been times in the midst of my writing my gratitude blog when I felt like an absolute fraud–here I was writing about gratitude and the blessings in my life when part of me felt panicky and freaked out and quaking in my boots that everything that had crashed down around me was going to stay crashed down and that I would never find my way out of the mess. I listen to myself tell people how even though life’s been challenging everything’s going to work out. I sound upbeat, optimistic, hopeful. But in the quiet of the night or wee hours of the morning, I sometimes wake with that liquid adrenaline coursing through my arms and legs like low voltage electric energy, wondering how I’m going to take care of everything that I need to handle to fulfill my obligations. Yet somehow I get up in the morning, bless the day, and tell myself that very same thing: everything’s going to be alright. Even now I shake my head. That is faith, I think.
I am grateful for what’s happening in my life at the moment. The blank canvas that is my next phase still stands on the easel waiting for the first touches of the brush to tap its flesh with various shades and hues transforming it into a vision of what I am becoming. That’s a fancy way of saying I still don’t know quite what things are shaping up to be for me at this moment in my life. I can’t recall ever having a less clear idea of anything in my fifty-plus years of living. It is an odd feeling to literally have everything in one’s life up in the air, but that is my truth of the moment.When that changes, you all will be among the first to know. In the meantime, thanks for walking along with me. It’s an interesting,windy, uncharted path. Definitely not for the faint of heart!
I’ll do my best to be back here tomorrow. I hope you’ll take my hand and join me once again as we walk the path of gratitude. So be it!
