CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION
Lately, I’ve been strangely hungry for the days quietly, even courageously endured.
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Exacting a life purpose from unexpected circumstance is precisely why I believe we were brought here. Not to fabricate or invent a reason for existence, but to celebrate existence for its own sake.
In the dead of night, I quietly open my blog to December 26, 2020—
Do we really have the potential to glow [to give off a steady light without flame] even in our weakest moment, even without effort or determination to do so? —
I wrote that line with less than half of my hair remaining on my head. In the end, when the last of it fell in clumps to the floor, I caught myself marveling at the extent to which I really didn’t care. Discovering who we are—what we value and what deep courage we possess—necessitates being fully present in and through all things. All. Things.
It’s not to say that goal-setting isn’t worthy. But what a marvelous encounter with the Living God the unrehearsed and unimagined brings.
In the calm response to the unexpected, we can hear His whisper, the One who positions himself between the edge of darkness and what He knows we can endure. It is He who awakens purpose there, in that in-between where the soul holds its breath.
At the edge of a cliff the year suspends, dangling between what was and what is.
At midnight on the last minute in the collection of 525,600, the world will beg you to install the most popular tricks and gimmicks to get you through another year.
“Resolutions,” they call it. But refuse to settle for someone else’s version of the essential thing.
For an instant, you will believe that the greatest wisdom is not your own but belongs to the collective resolutions of a thousand voices, each one believing they have something to give you that is more valuable than the next.
Yet what we alone have survived is our sage. Endurance is our guru.
Ours is to listen to the truth that comes to us through the hard moment. Or to turn away.
Ours is to tell ourselves that lived truth and then love ourselves anyway…maybe even more, because of it.
Have I underestimated the unscripted minutes of my days—
The things that make me anxious, multiply my minutes and my steps.
The moments that challenge my thinking, increase my brain cells.
The hurts that make me cry in private, make me just a little more patient, forgiving, tender.
These ARE the story—the pieces of humanity that make us more interesting and more remarkable than we will ever know.
We are wrong to delete these minutes from our story. These are the best parts of the read.
To be you—
unsteady and still honest about it,
disillusioned and yet hopeful in the same breath,
willing to expand all that you are,
to evolve and believe no matter what may be.
This is cause for banging pans and blowing horns when the clock strikes midnight.
THIS alone is cause for celebration.
NOTES:
What is your cause for celebration? Mine could easily be as simple as making it through another year. But the farther I get from my initial diagnosis, the more compelled I am not to merely mark off days on a calendar but to revel in the opportunities that each moment brings.
Over the past year we’ve talked about larger themes like Beauty in the Hard Moment, the Metabolic Approach to Living, The Healing Home, and The Art of Noticing Everything.
In the next year I intend to expand this Journal to offer something more. What that “more” is will depend on what compels you. Is there something you’d like to spend more time talking about?
For the first time in five years, I’m going to take a one week break to do some planning and to incorporate your ideas into the stories ahead.
Let’s plan to meet back here on January 11. And together, let’s write this Journal in 2025.
Much Love,
jk