Dearest friend,
I hope you are doing well. Let me get down to it.
None of this will be a surprise to you, but you may not have thought about these matters in this way for a while. So many times I catch glimpses of this, but I hardly ever stay there, and I constantly wonder if I’m missing something important. Let us ponder about life for a few minutes, as we step back from the flurry of action and the incessant nature of decision-making.
These are some of my thoughts.
Life is not in balance, because life is not meant to be in balance, even as we seek to attain and maintain balance. It is good to accept this. Yet it’s only once we have accepted that balance will ever elude us that we’re able to strive for the balance we could attain. Life is in accepting it’s unbalanced at the same time as it’s striving to attain balance. I am learning to accept what I can’t change to change what I can.
Life is overwhelming. It stretches us beyond our capacity, and we may be tempted to curse life for it, but actually we are being reminded that we have limited resources. God is being kind to remind us of this. Life also stretches us beyond our capability in order to grow us, and of course this makes sense as we look back at the younger versions of ourselves. We always feel we have outgrown or superseded those versions. But life is overwhelming, make no mistake.
Life is full of loss, because things are constantly changing, and there is always a News story or an interaction with someone that will upset our equilibrium. Then there’s the full-blown loss that sends us poleaxed into grief. We hardly rationalise that life, as difficult as it was, was a breeze compared to what it has become. Grief certainly puts the rest of life into context. It makes life feel like a holiday — a sweet, cruisy staycation. We hear people complain about their ordinary lives and we scratch our heads, because we would have ordinary life back in an instant. But such is life, we all get a turn at grief. It never looks that bad from the outside looking in, but from the inside looking out it is hell on earth.
Do you think this letter is overly negative? I really want it to be an encouragement. Truth ought to be encouraging.
Another thing in life that bears consideration is the idea that what cannot be changed ought to be accepted and what can be changed ought to be challenged. There is a thing called ‘The Serenity Prayer’, and we must imagine if we get this wisdom right, we will experience profound peace.
All this thinking has made me tired, and that is another thing about life. Life is tiring. But when we are dead there is no more tiredness, so we might as well not be fearful of becoming tired. We can have faith that we will recover. It makes little sense to drive tiredness into the oblivion of burnout that fails to listen to what our bodies are telling us, and yet still so many do this very thing. It is wise to find rest for our souls.
So in being tired, I’m taking my own advice and signing off.
Yours truly,
A friend.
Photo by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash
No comments:
Post a Comment