The Journey 9/5/2021

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

If you read last week’s blog you know that the times for me they were trying.  At that point I was praying for many things. I needed endurance, strength, faith, hope and probably most significantly perspective.  This week the road is not so low and dark and the sky above is not so dismal and grey.  If I were superstitious I would almost be afraid to type the following but, this week has been much improved.  I can feel the path beneath me rising at a slow but steady incline.  While I would be lying to say that I am not ridiculously pleased at the progress things seem to be making I am doing my very best to really be sure I don’t lose sight of the things that I hope I garnered. I guess I am seeing right now how easy it is to forget the struggles and the desperation once things begin to return to the good side of “normal”.

I certainly am thrilled to be on what appears to be the upside of things but I am consciously going to more effort at this time to cling to what I’ve learned.  I can feel everything in me just wanting to take for granted that tough times are on their way out and now I get to find relief from the plague of the stress and anxiety that the difficulties caused.  But that is missing the point isn’t it?  It seems for the first time in the bulk of my adult life I feel like I am realizing that maybe I had to go through difficulty for a reason.  Not some sadistic reason mind you, but more something along the lines of tough times being meant to teach you things that the easier times won’t and can’t.  I have to admit that I feel rather foolish if not downright ignorant that it has taken me this long in my life to really fully embrace this concept.  It is making me wonder how many lessons I have gone without learning simply because I was too busy reveling in a difficulty being over as opposed to reflecting what growth the difficulty could have cultivated within me in the first place.  I suppose I am not very far off in feeling like an inattentive child.  How many nuggets of wisdom have I left sitting by the wayside? How many periods of turmoil has my life had to revisit because I kept exiting them one after the other completely devoid of the benefit that was basically shoved in my face.  Should I be in my fourth decade before I figured this type of thing out?  I really don’t feel like it should have taken me this long.

I am not even sure why I am telling this to all of you. I have a sneaking suspicion that I feel like if I repeat this enough to myself, I am hopeful that maybe I will retain it better. I guess I am also hopeful that maybe, please let this be the case, that someone else out there has found themselves in this same boat.  I also have to say I am very interested to test out my theory that if I really and truly put in the effort to actually learn from tests in life that maybe, just maybe, I may have less tests to endure?!

I haven’t really said much today of value I don’t think.  As I mentioned I am pretty sure that the sole purpose of this blog is to drill things into my own skull in the hopes that they don’t seep out.  I talked last week about struggling through the valleys in hopes of reaching the mountaintops.  But if you haven’t weighed the value of the journey then are you really getting the full worth of the destination?  The trip itself is so I important and all these years I have been traveling to locales only to never be able to find them again because I paid no attention whatsoever to what I should have been observing along the way.  Yes, that’s right, I am still fussing at myself about this same topic.  I will leave you in peace now.  I suppose I’ll close with my parting sentiment to myself; when the hard road gets easier remember all those bumps have a message to impart and it’s a message that can and will be utterly lost if you only value the smooth ground ahead.