Breathe

60: (November 2024)

I accidentally ripped the front bumper off my car this week. I’ve never done anything so patently stupid before. I somehow managed to dismantle the front bumper while backing out of my own driveway; don’t ask—it was quite a feat! I won’t go into the utterly humiliating details, but the car had to be towed to a repair shop and will take weeks to fix.

Yes, I’ve felt frazzled this month, for reasons both personal and societal. Most acutely, I feel sorrow for a family member who has been enduring great physical pain, and grief for a country I thought I knew. On top of that, I feel despair over the wars raging in other parts of the world. Ripping off my front bumper has jolted me to the realization that I may need to slow down a bit. To breathe. There is so much ambient stress in the world, and it can seep into us despite our best efforts to stay strong, grounded, sane.

I’m going to try to focus more on the moment before me, and as ever, to find grace in that moment, because there is always something to be grateful for. I’m not big on exercising, but I’m making more of an effort to do some simple weightlifting (if using three-pound weights qualifies as such), so that stress has a release and doesn’t stay locked within my body. I’m being sure to spend time with friends and my Unitarian Universalist church community. I’m working myself up to improvising on the piano, the ultimate stress release for me, but only when I’m in the right mindset, which I haven’t arrived at yet.

My car will be repaired and returned to me sometime before Christmas. If only one’s spirits were able to be repaired as easily. But they will be. There’s no giving up or giving in. There’s reaching out, building bridges, and giving thanks. And I’ll definitely be paying more attention behind the wheel.

40: (November 2004)

With Thanksgiving upon us, I have been thinking more about what it means to be thankful. Many spiritual writers express the same principle in different ways. It seems to boil down to this: that by staying in a state of gratitude, nothing can penetrate one’s peace or contentment. That is a powerful endorsement for striving to be thankful.

Holidays are meant to give us pause, to give us a break from our daily routines to reflect on and deepen our connections to what we find meaningful in life. But I know I am not alone in finding it difficult not to get swept up in a flurry of food and household preparations. Were we all to expend as much energy on actually giving thanks—on appreciating those sitting around the table with us and the food before us—the world might experience a major shift. Gratitude is not a stagnant state; one does not experience gratitude and then resume life uninterrupted. True gratitude transforms a person. Gratitude expands. It is abundance which cannot be contained tidily; abundance overflows, spills out.

There are some things in my life that I am not so thrilled about. I try to challenge myself to be grateful for those things as well—to learn the lessons I need to learn, to grow in ways I may never have imagined, to embrace change for the opportunities contained therein.

This is a persistent struggle for me. Sometimes when I find myself feeling down about whatever it is that is not going so well, I try to bring myself back to gratitude by opening my eyes wider and taking in a bigger picture of the world around me. There is nothing like bringing me to my knees in thanks if I spend even five minutes looking around at what other people have to endure in life.

Then again, there are many things that I simply take for granted. Last week, a friend of mine remarked on what a miracle it is that we wake up every day; she is fascinated by the process of sleeping and waking on a daily basis. Now that’s gratitude! Imagine if in that first waking moment of the day, when the alarm goes off, or the sun nudges our eyes open, we all thought, “Wow! What a gift!” It may not change the world, but then again, it may just be the first step.

60-40:  

It’s a tough time for many people. The holidays can be stressful for numerous reasons, lots of folks are dealing with chronic illness and the physical consequences of being fortunate enough to live long lives, and the state of our country and the world is generating a tremendous sense of unrest.

But we can still control our reactions to these things. We can find quiet moments and concentrate on breathing—deeply. We can hold all those we love in our hearts. And we can give thanks.