Is it just me, or has this been a rugged year so far? Joan is emphatically right when she keeps an emphasis on life’s blessings, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of struggles along the way. I just spent the better part of a week scraping back together a functional workstation, and, as you’ve no doubt heard me whine before, my lifestyle dependency on computers is a major source of distress from time to time. For me, few things trigger such a sense of the forlorn. Perhaps it will continue until I learn to transcend it—or finally accept at an even deeper level that there’s a supreme power in control of my existence.
I remind myself that any flirtation with modes of complaint is without validity, for is there really a soul in the world who isn’t weathering his own vicissitudes? (Tom Cruise doesn’t count, dammit.) I think of my friends the Bells, or the school community in Marion County, or Janet and Jerome, and I can’t help but consider that much of life involves suffering. I suppose it’s about how we deal with it.
Take my niece Hayley, for example. Surely she had a much different expectation of how her 11th-grade basketball season would transpire, compared to the difficulties that came around the corner instead. A recent media story laid it all out before the public. Good grief. Nevertheless, among her top competitors, she still leads the area with an 80% free-throw percentage. Hardly anybody on the court has been pressured this winter as much as Belle, but she maintains her composure at the line.
Like I said before, it’s about how we deal with it. Keep plugging, “gril.”