Eighty – One Days with .03

The last thing in the world I have wanted to do this week is write a column. It has been, to put it lightly, a crappy fortnight.

I found myself betrayed and betraying myself in ways in which I thought I had healed in my leadership. My daughter and I got into a fight about taxes. My clients were having challenges that impacted my life and got me all riled up about burdens they had to carry because of other peoples’ ignorance.

About every six months or so I just don’t have something positive to say.

I took out the typewriter my father gave me for high school graduation and started to type manually just to try to divert my disdain and get a different perspective. My fingers, to my surprise, remembered better than before where all the little idiosyncrasies of an Olympia portable were placed. I automatically hit the Margin key when I needed a few extra spaces for my first sentences. The little pinky on my hand remembered where the Backspace key was. The only finger that refused to print correctly was the one that repeatedly hit the ‘cents’ key, which on an old typewriter is located where the present day computer keyboard has an apostrophe key. Very telling that there is not ‘cents’ key on today’s keyboards.

Typing on that wonderful old machine I discovered my fingers were stronger than I thought they would be. I also discovered an ease I did not have before. I taught myself to type, pretty much, after I stopped using that manual and had switched to an electric.

Thoughts drifted to my dad. I knew my topic for this column was going to be the long sunshine streak. I mean, what does a Northwesterner do with 81 days of sunshine during which only .03 inches of moisture landed on earth?

My dad and sunshine. Hmmm. My dad had little sunshine in his life. A gentle soul, his first placement as a pastor was in a church that had 15 pastors in 17 years. He never had a chance. And my mom, who had been raised in great wealth, ended up digging up rogue carrots from previous tenants in the parsonage in order to cook dinner. Boy did he hear about that!

He got a job in a safe place, a state mental hospital, where the ‘congregants’ were mostly living in a fantasy world and not likely to challenge his leadership and stayed there for twenty-three years making the most of it.

My dad loved it that I never played it safe. He encouraged my sense of adventure every step of the way. My love of the unknown lead to the development of my faith. One can partner easily with walking into the unfamiliar, trusting in God’s mercy, Grace, Love and Wisdom, if one has a basic inclination to do so.

For me, the assurance that life will eventually lead to the positive and the blessed and blessing is like pocketing 81 days of sunshine for a long siege of precipitation. There isn’t a day this winter that I will not remember the warmth of that sun, the good humor of people who had enough vitamin D, the pleasure of activities done only in the sunshine and long evenings of pleasant fellowship as we hung out on our lawns, parks, and uptown.

I feel the same way about power outages. In the midst of hustle and bustle, and nights when I can not wind down because there is yet another task to do, I remember those lovely nights of candlelight and blankets and reading by flashlight when even the hum of the refrigerator is silenced in blessed peace.

From whence does the energy for adventure come? It comes from sunny days we’ve experienced, people who love us but never had a chance to do as much as we have had a chance to do, the desire to not let our woundedness or past hurts run our lives, and the joy of anticipating goodness at every new turn. It’s a belief in our own resiliency.

I let myself down recently. I deferred my leadership, an old habit that comes from fear of conflict, instead of boldly taking the bull the horns and demonstrating the wonderful process of creating something new and fun and helpful to those around us. I forgot to let the sunshine pour into the center of my spirit. I let the fear of impending rain in others determine how I presented myself. Not a good thing.

And why did I write this column this week? Was it to prove I could despite all? No. Was it to rise above the dark and spread the sunshine? No. Was it out of duty and responsibility? No.

It was because someone on the street, someone I didn’t know, took me by the arm and said, "I love your column. I read it all the time." I wrote it because of you. Because life is hard and I CAN tell you that facing it head on is way better than turning your face ever so slightly because you are afraid of conflict – which will happen in the end anyway.

So…be not afraid, bank that sunshine, walk forward into the unknown. Be safe, but not at the expense of creativity, or love, or new adventures. Push yourself out of your comfort zone and smile. Fewer down days. Greater reward.

Love,
Deborah