ON when it rains

Yesterday was rough. It was the kind of day that prompted a desire to hide under my blanket, tucked away in bed. The kind of day where everything is delightful one minute, and chaos the next. A right hook, followed by an uppercut, and then, bang, square in the face. Ring the bell, this girl was knocked out.

I wonder about these days. Even as I'm experiencing them, I wonder 'where is the lesson?'. I watch myself, usually without being able to affect my own behavior or to stop my own words, in a nearly out of body experience, and I think about what I'm trying to be taught. I had pulled the blanket up and over my head, Layla tucked in next to me, tail wagging and thinking we were having a grand playtime, and was trying to figure out what the heck had happened in the past hour, when it dawned on me.

We are not supposed to know what's going to happen. We don't know. It is not for us to understand or to be made aware of earlier than the very second it happens. For those of us that yearn to control, this can cause a bit (a lot) of the fear of the unknown. But it isn't for us to know. We are not in control, we are not God.

And then, another thought: I am not God, but I have God. And there, under that blanket, I felt that familiar comfort of knowing we are never alone, and my heart started to feel lighter. As it lightened, I slowly began to surrender to all of the situations that had just occurred, and I slowly gained clarity.

Slowly.

It's all a series of choices. We choose how we feel, what we're dwelling on, how we're thinking. We choose to believe someone else over ourselves, or vice versa. We choose to lose an entire day to tears, or only an hour. We choose to reach out, or we wait with fingers crossed for the other person to reach out. We let it go, or we don't. We can make a choice to be on our own team, or against ourselves. We can ask our friends for advice, or we can listed to our guts and our hearts.

The beauty here is that once I remember it's all about choosing, my power comes right back to me. Being a victim is unbelievably unappealing to me. You know, the type of people who bemoan why something is happening to them, or the kinds that sing their sob story to the world. "I'll never get this, I'll never do that, it'll never work out". I know this kind of person well because I used to be it - and once in awhile I'll go back down that road. But then: choices. And all of a sudden it becomes questions of why is this happening to me turned into what lesson am I being taught, and how will I pick myself back up, and what do I want to do next.

If you'll excuse me, I have some choices to make.

photos by Daniel Silbert