There’s only been one time in my career as a nurse when I was truly terrified. There have been other close calls and more tough, emotionally draining shifts than I can count, but one situation left me wondering, worried, and on edge for weeks afterwards.
The situation had so many ramifications for the future. It seemed that all of a sudden everything I thought about anything was in question. The “what-if’s” swirled, the potential implications list growing by the hour in my anxious mind.
Weeks passed.
Waiting.
Waiting.
More waiting.
Suddenly the answers came, results unveiled, and thankfully, the situation resolved without any long term affects on my life, but the emotional upheaval of that time can rise to the surface of my emotional pool without warning.
A few weeks ago, two seemingly unrelated things happened: I listed to the Happy Hour with Jamie Ivey episode featuring Alexandra Kuykendall, the author of Loving My Actual Life, and then a few days later, my nursing scars left from this significant event described above were abruptly, roughly reopened during a shift at work.
As I reflected on both these events – thinking both on valuing my everyday life plus dealing with the deluge of emotions this particular nursing shift brought I had this thought
I once mourned the life I was currently living as an impossibility.
Mourned it. That’s right.
Dismissed it.
My heart was broken because I thought, in a mere moment, my dreams for my future were shattered in a million pieces.
Yet – it didn’t turn out that way – as my incident was resolved, but as I thought more about it, I realized again about how much I take for granted.
One day, not many years ago, I sobbed to my mom that everything was lost.
Today, life is hopeful, beautiful, and full. My days are spent with a loving husband, a crazy dog, and a God Who is with me, loving me, no matter any situation’s resolution.
Sometimes it’s hard to see the beauty in our seemingly mundane everyday, but if in an instant, if your daily rhythm, your routine, your dreams, the assumptions you currently have were gone — would you mourn that life?
Would you give anything for it back?
In the darkness of the valleys of life, we long for the gray skies of the everyday, with just even a little light to guide our way.
So why in the grayness of the seemingly mundane everyday do we mourn? We wish for more sunshine, more this, less that, instead of loving our actual life.
Everyday we have a choice. A challenge: What if we refused to fall in the trap of mourning the mundane and realized that in a moment it could all be gone?
What if we decided to change our perception that our everyday life is gray and mundane and tried to see the extraordinary in it?
Because if we did those things, we would also remember that gray skies are not only the precursor to rain, but also the rainbow.
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