“Take one moment at a time and do the next right thing.”–Eleanor Amerman Sutphen
What Did I hear? 👂
My ears perked up when I heard the guest on a podcast share the above phrase based upon a poem by Sutphen, but made popular by both Elisabeth Elliot and Carl Jung. I had just arrived home with several bags filled with groceries to put away. Setting down the bags, I typed the phrase into my phone’s reminder app in order to remember it. Then, ironically enough, I returned to the next moment: putting away the groceries.
Like a persistent earworm, that phrase kept looping through my brain. Maybe it was Divine Providence, or maybe my subconscious niggled me to recognize the words I needed to hear. Regardless, the universe had offered me a nugget of wisdom to the question I had been asking, but had not yet been able to fully articulate: What can I do in the face of the difficult and uncertain life moment in which I found myself?
Snowy Days can lead to Sluggish Ways 😏
The month of January was a slippery, and less than stellar, start to the new year. All around me, icy roads, alleys, and sidewalks served as a reminder that I was struggling to find my footing. As one who is not naturally organized and often has no sense of time, I function optimally with a routine/schedule. It’s not that I can’t “go with the flow.” I can do that quite brilliantly, but I don’t accomplish nearly as much, nor do I make as many–if any–inroads towards goals.
It is as if I have been dropped deep into a dark and menacing forest filled with a multitude of statuesque tree shadows and brambling thorny briers. Meanwhile, a multitude of strands in life’s web are criss-crossing in ways that make it feel less integrous, as if at any moment, the winds will shift and blow a hole in the tenuous gossamer nexus of life. I sense time sliding sideways, and I am trying to find my footing, so I don’t fall into the thin ice at the center of the mostly frozen pond. Arms flapping this way and that way, steps shortening, stumbling, and struggling to remain upright because I need to find my stride once more.
The Struggle Can be Real 😞
I am not the first, nor am I alone, I suspect, in feeling “something” akin to a crisis–a time in life when I find myself deeply questioning my purpose, my identity, and my role in all that is occurring. It is a time where I feel helpless to help others who need it but won’t accept it; a time with still unachieved goals and dreams, but I struggle to see, much less find, the path forward; and, a time in which I frequently ask myself: Am I doing the best I can with this one precious life I have been given?
Personally speaking, it feels as if the to-do list grows longer by the day, but few items are getting marked off. While all around me, events, completely out of my control, dictate more chaos. Pixelated ideas frequent my mind, but my brain resists zooming in and focusing on any one thought as if the identity of each idea has been hidden like a person being interviewed for an investigative, undercover documentary. Overthinking, second-guessing, and a feeling of dormancy have entered my mental home and overstayed their welcome.
The Sweet Lesson of Winter Trees ❄️
As I write these words, I pause to gaze out at the trees in my backyard. They too are experiencing dormancy. Deciduous trees have slowed their internal processes and metabolism, halting their own growth in order to conserve energy. Inside the trees, cells have hardened and shrunk. Additionally, the water between the cells has frozen, and the water inside cells is becoming more dense and syrupy. Some trees even grow thicker bark in the winter to create a sheath of preservation until warmer temperatures arrive when growth and leaf production can once more occur.
I take a deep breath and feel the rise of my belly. Dawn’s light has gifted another overcast winter morning. The birds have also risen–chirp, chirp, chirping the gossip of a new day. The rise and fall of their flight, along with their up and down hip-hops along tree branches make me smile. I sigh out the exhale I had been holding, noticing the fall of my belly. With each breath I take, as I continue to ponder the nature beyond my window, I can’t help but notice the rising and falling of my stomach.
The Rising and the Falling 🌅🌄
The sunrise, the trees, the birds, and even my breath remind me that everything is subject to rising and falling. Our pain and sadness, our joys and happiness, and even current events are all impermanent, rising and falling with the various seasons of life. This season of personal dormancy that has banked to new heights in my mind will eventually thaw like the melting of the once-deep snow. This is the nature of impermanence–the rising and the falling–nothing can last forever.
Thus, these dark doldrums of winter housed in my mental guest room might be offering me an opportunity to do less, perhaps allowing my creative juices and energy to fully concentrate and thicken, much like the trees in my backyard, into the sweet syrup of forward progress. It will just take the sweet essence of time. And the only way to get there from the dark passages of here is to take one breath, one moment at a time and keep choosing to do the next right thing.
Steph Simply 