As I sit here in the household room I have dedicated to be called my home office I pause and listen to the quiet noise around me. No one is home except for me and my dog who sleeps in the room I now refer to as "the Library". His peace for the moment being close to the treasured books that I have often gotten lost in. Getting lost.....mentally anyway...... something that is not too terribly hard for me to do. It is not difficult for me to lose focus and have my brain drift off track, and so I work hard from day to day to keep it and myself on course. But today I am alone so I allow my thoughts to wander.
I hear the furnace rumble out its heat from the ducts in the walls and I smile to myself at the chirping from the few birds that are outside. If I sit close enough to the window I can feel the sun warm my skin on this late Winter day the calendar calls Spring.
I have allowed frustrations to run wildly through my body over silly things, things I don't have and things I cannot control. But in the quietness of the moment I come to see that I don't really need more than I got and shouldn't worry about control because it will either all work out or it won't and I'll do what I have always done..... survive and keep trying.
This is the moment when I close my eyes and realize that I am a superstar and that I am in love as much as I am loved and if you have to ask if that means something romantic, I cannot help you with an answer.
This is the moment I remind myself that happiness and success are measured and valued wrong, because they come from within ones soul and are NOT checked off from a sunshine list. And I wonder if I have reached my capabilities, my peak, or if more is coming. Because whether it is or not, I am always going to be reaching for more.... more knowledge, more acceptance, more skill, more love, more peace.
This is the moment I stumble upon the revelation that even in my darkest hours I am surrounded by more beauty than I often acknowledge....... I think that applies to most of us. And I know that when I offer my heart to the ones closest to me and those strangers far away it is to a different degree but also very much the same; and it is sad only because some don't realize just how pure and genuine what I offer is. And this is the moment I feel in my heart that I still love this sometimes angry and depressed world and I will never stop.
I remember that when I was six I faced some very difficult challenges and barriers that I still see shadows of today and I know that with time they will get better but some can also get worse. This is the moment when I can let my inner calmness fill my entire body and head so that I can breathe because there are certain factors that will make me forget but also allow me to recall on occasion.
This is the moment to laugh and to cry, to believe, to learn; learn to share, accommodate and accept. This is the moment to realize that it is alright, alright to slow down and catch a breath, to fall behind a little, to be afraid, to be different; there is nothing wrong with being different. Frustration will come again along with its buddies confusion and depression and it is okay. The struggle sometimes felt within is just that, a struggle; neither bad nor good and only we can let it go. Let it go.
It is a time to know that forgetting and than reminding oneself of these moments, these feelings, is part of life; it is part of discovery, vivid and glorious!
This is why we need to cherish our moments, however small and short lived or big and stretched out; because they are all beautiful and they are all worth it.
There is nothing wrong with being different, that is for sure.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason, your blog post here reminded me of the following part of an essay by Michael Chabon. It was exquisitely written and an excerpt from the article is most fitting for this Monday.
"The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken.
Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.
The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.”"
(“Wes Anderson’s Worlds” by Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books).
Thank you for writing this. I needed it today.
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