Week 7 – Living for Today

Saturday 05 November 6:20 am – week 7….

I have watched the growing light and the mist in the valley. How beautiful the valley is at this time in the morning. In the distance a plane makes its way across the sky marking its course with a jetstream. At 6:25 am the sun peeps its head over the horizon, and slowly stretches its glow above the tree-line. Whammo! At 6:29 am its rays are streaming over the valley and I am blinded by its light. It is a brand new day and a brand new beginning.

I have been thinking about the five or seven stages of grief that you supposedly have to go through in a grief process before you can move on, with those stages being – Shock – Pain – Anger – Depression – Readjustment – Acceptance and hope. I wanted to get straight to acceptance so my pain would stop. What is the meaning of this word ‘acceptance’ anyway. What is it that I have to accept? The end of ‘we’? The betrayal? The broken family? The hurt? The pain? The lost financial security? The being left alone? What is it than I am supposed to accept before I can move on? I wanted to get to acceptance and I knew I was slowly moving through the stages but I kept being pushed back to pain. If I had to get to acceptance before I could move on; was there some way of going straight to acceptance as a way of skipping through all the other stages? Would it make all this process end more quickly and make the pain stop?

Of course I was nowhere near being able to accept what had happened or understand why or or understand the how it happened and…. even though I am a forgiving person, I was not yet ready to forgive…….

However, I had reached the point where I began to accept being thrown into ‘today’. I was still mourning the past and I was still anxious about the future, but I had today. Today had not been taken away from me. Today was here and now and I could choose to enjoy today. This was the new me being the captain of my soul, accepting today, choosing my own responses, choosing to live in the moment of today and enjoy it.

So I began to get up early and enjoy the magnificent summer sunrises, picking vegetables from the garden, looking out at my valley and enjoying the view, taking in the blossoming flowers and their beautiful colours, taking walks, spending time with my family and friends and my beautiful grand-daughter, enjoying their company, enjoying each moment that life brought me each day……… Today is here and it is for me and I am loving it.

John Denver’s song says it all …..

Sweet Surrender
John Denver

Lost and alone on some forgotten highway,
travelled by many, remembered by few;
Lookin’ for something that I can believe in;
Lookin’ for something that I’d like to do with my life.

There’s nothing behind me and nothing that ties me;
To something that might have been true yesterday;
Tomorrow is open; right now it seems to be more than enough
to just be here today;

And I don’t know what the future is holding in store;
I don’t know where I’m going; I’m not sure where I’ve been;
There’s a spirit that guides me; a light that shines for me;
My life is worth living; I don’t need to see the end.

Sweet, sweet surrender;
Live, live without care;
Like a fish in the water;
Like a bird in the air.