Those words, “just as they are”, cropped up in two different places today, and in another place last week. I figured there was a message in that. The first time I saw them, it said, “We don’t see things just as they are, we see them as we are.” Then, within fifteen minutes, in a completely different place, I read, “Give gratitude for things just as they are.”
I thought seeing things “as we are” as opposed to “just as they are”, was so true for me. Last winter, in the first three months of this journey, I saw everything through my feelings of hurt and pain. It took months to begin to see them “just as they are”. For me, this meant gaining greater clarity by realizing its not about me and my pain. When I put the pain aside, the other 75% of the pie graph became visible. I learned that when I look at situations through how I am feeling, I only see 25% of “how they are”. If I feel crummy, the circumstances appear crummy, and most of what it really is gets obscured by that.
Yesterday and today, when old feelings of hurt and pain from last spring were flung across my path, (more October gauntlets – thank goodness this month is almost over) my reaction was so much different. Instead of sinking into those feelings I was able to look at the whole graph, recognize them for what they are, and put them aside.
Today I took the second piece of advice these words brought me – “Give gratitude for things just as they are”. Even if I had to practice deliberate gratitude and fake it, when I turned around to look back, things looked different. When a shadow crossed my path, I just said the words “just as they are”, thank you God.
And so, as another day goes by, after ten long months the train is pulling into the station, and I am arriving at “acceptance”, and ….I have written.
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