The snow showed up—later than anticipated, but it’s here. I just stepped outside to capture a couple of images that, in a small way, depict what it’s like out there. What they don’t capture is the silence, broken only by the sound of a neighbour’s snowblower. Someone getting ahead of the white while it’s still relatively manageable.
Gerry is in the kitchen baking cookies. Chocolate chip. I bought a big bag in the summer when our granddaughter was here because she likes to bake. But she didn’t, and my husband has been using up the chips, making batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies ever since.
Molly is batting an empty water bottle around that Gerry put a handful of kibble inside. That was one of her favourite things to play with when she was a puppy—still is, it seems. She’s been on curled up my lap for a good chunk of the day until now while I’ve been lost in a book. It’s taken me a while to get into this story, but I’m there now and it’s a good one to get lost in on a snowy Saturday afternoon.
Earlier, I exchanged text messages with my bestie and my daughter. Still earlier, before the snow started, Gerry went to the store and returned with a Starbucks for me. That’s what love looks like sometimes. 😊 While he was out, I changed the sheets on our bed, tended to some banking, vacuumed the doormats, and emptied the dust container on the Shark after I figured out, once again, how to do so. (It’s just not intuitive to me.) It’s been a sweet, slow Saturday.
Yesterday, I looked out the front window at grey sky and white ground and there was something about the light that caused me to remember Saturday afternoons many years ago when I carried a lump in my gut and melancholy in my heart and Sunday evenings brought relief. Sometimes, I see those feelings on grey afternoons. That sentence seems strange, doesn’t it? That one sees feelings. But sure as I’m sitting here, I tell you that I do. It makes me sad sometimes.
But Saturdays are no longer what they were. They are peaceful, and in retirement, not all that different from any other day. It’s a gift. One I’m grateful for.
Soon, I’ll think about supper. Later, we’ll pull our grandson’s hockey game up on the big screen. The day will wind down and we’ll sleep restfully. These simple, ordinary days are no small thing to one who, earlier in life, longed for such a thing in the midst of turbulent times.
I take them for granted. I have come to expect them. But sometimes, when I catch a glimpse of what it was like once upon a time in a different life and uncomfortable feelings surface, I pause to give thanks for the journey that eventually brought me to this peaceful place. It was a rocky one in places but the road was one well worth taking.
I’m reminded of wisdom I gleaned from a book that changed forever the way I experienced life. Mind if I share a few nuggets from M. Scott Peck’s life-altering (at least, for me) book, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth? It’s no longer “new” but the lessons he offers are timeless. Maybe you’ll appreciate them as much as I do.
Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time.
To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.
Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure of life by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.
If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine.