blessings...

We don’t get to choose the shape or timing of the blessings that we receive in this life. They come to us like the weather, and we merely choose our clothing accordingly and get on with our day and our lives. Or we don’t, and we end up soaking wet or freezing because we believed so surely in the forecast that we refused to be prepared for any alternative.




This concept is hard for me. I like to try to shape the world around me as if it’s Play-Doh. It doesn’t work. I know this. I’ve learned this lesson over and over in my life, but I still try. Which I suppose means that I haven’t really learned this lesson yet, or that there is still more there for me to understand.



I’m not saying that there aren’t choices to be made or that those choices don’t have an impact, because at times, they do. We are beings that can choose. We can get up and do the next right thing. We can use kind words or hurtful ones. We can take care of our bodies or harm them. In daily moments, there is always a choice.



Even big moments, we can choose. We can pick up and move away, or stay put and ride it out. We can attempt to leave important people or moments behind us. But in my experience, the important stuff chases us from within anyway, refusing to let go or become party to failed relations.



For the big stuff, I often feel like life is just a speeding train. And when we think that we are shaping the outcome, we're merely riding inside, touching the window with our own unique fingerprints. We're trying to change things, but in reality, all we’re doing is smudging up the glass, and obscuring our own view.



So I’m setting the Play-Doh down, and only listening to the forecast that I see and feel outside my window. I’ll set some comfort items aside for contingencies. I will sit down inside the train and keep my very own unique fingerprints to myself on my lap. I will look out the window as this one life of mine flies by, and I will try to see the world around me for what it is, and not what I wanted it to be.



I will be thankful for the blessings, exactly as they come.

A Part of the Whole...

There are a million tiny stepping stones across the river of my life, and if I hadn’t chosen or been placed on this path, this exact one, I would be somewhere else entirely. I would be a whole other version of myself.

I can think of moments when I did choose. Moments that I stood at a clear crossroad and made a choice that impacted my life in some monumental way. I moved out west to Colorado. I didn’t move to California. I moved back to Wisconsin. I chose to return to school. Those moments had an obvious and instant impact.



But so many of the moments were not so clearly defined. They were merely me living my life, and little by little the choices that I made each day changed the shape of the outcome as a whole. I’m sure these smaller moments had just as much impact, but I didn’t notice them. I didn’t pine or stress or worry over them. I simply lived my life, and the changes came, like how the seasons turn. One day I just noticed the difference.

So often we hear the analogy that life is a highway that we travel. We talk about the things and places and people that we’ve left behind, as if that’s even possible. As if the important events and circumstances of our lives are merely temporary, and that they can be cast off and then forgotten. As if once we’re finished with them, these things and people and emotions are no longer with us.

But I don’t think that life is a highway. I tend to think that life is more akin to how a tree grows. And that every storm, every season of sunshine, every drought and spring freeze and warm summer night becomes a part of us. A part of the whole. The storms of our lives leave their mark, sometimes they even make parts of us come crashing to the ground. Sometimes we can pick up the pieces and sometimes we just have to clean up the whole wet, ugly mess and do something with it. But inevitably the warm windy days of summer, gentle spring rains and hot humid days come, so startlingly fruitful that we can watch leaves grow by the minute.

Regardless, it all resides within us, like rings within the tree. These moments, whether painstakingly awful or unbelievably beautiful, grow within us, in every branch, through every limb. They don’t leave us, because they are a part of who we are.