difficult days

Who hasn't laid claim to their share of difficult days? Sometimes they seem to run back to back and make it seem like life itself has been difficult, but each day is but a small part of life.

Take a piece of graph paper and mark out a grid that has 840 squares in it (that would be 84 squares by 10 or some such) and then color in 12 blocks for every year of your life and one block for each month you are in towards your next birthday, you will see the way that time stretches for you. Each block represents 30 days, give or take. For each year, write down three things you remember that define the year and you will begin to see that our difficult days don't really add up to much at all. Even our difficult years are wedged between solid blocks of well being.

But it is easy to forget the good.

And as easy as it is to forget the good, it is even easier, in the drive to remember it to invalidate the memory of the not-so-good.

That is the hardest balance of all to achieve, to hold equally the memory of good and bad and to not let one tip the scales more then another. Because as you can see on the graph paper, there is still more time to pass. More time for things to happen either way.

In all my "changing my diet" I am beginning to more firmly orient myself to the totality of what has not happened and its absolute unpredictability. Rather than leave me wringing my hands, I find I am starting to sail along much more easily. The idea of having a direction is that you also have an idea of what you think the end looks like and therefore, you can handle anything that bumps up on the way, be it good or bad.

It becomes easier to tell what you should be worried about and what you should just leave alone to spin around until it digs itself a hole in the ground and is gone.

And it becomes easier to tell what things you should take on, because although they may make your life more difficult at first, you can see how they fit together in the final puzzle you are building.

Join me today at 11pm EST on blogtalkradio as I host a special broadcast for Grace Independent. This broadcast is in commemoration of the victims of 9/11 and focused on the prayers for peace from different faiths. Have a candle ready to light so we may all join together and begin to find our way out of this darkness. The link is http://blogtalkradio.com/grace-independent.

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