Awakening Your Inner Hero

Wake Up, Every Day

I am sitting in my living room, close enough to our wood stove to feel its warmth soaking into my fingers, arms, legs and every other part of me as I type this message.

I love it.

It’s autumn.

It was a chilly 20 degrees this morning. Our ever-dependable sun didn’t rise until 7:35 am. The aspen and maple leaves in our backyard are dazzling. Bright yellow, red and orange. Dazzling, stunning, incredible, mesmerizing. You name the word. There are none that can fully match our actual sensory experience, but still each one gives us a flicker of our beyond-words autumn celebration.

Autumn is a time to pause, to soak in these spell-binding days of color, and to ponder and prepare for winter which is inching our way.

Change. Season to season. Month to month. Week to week. Day to day. Moment to moment. Change is the ONE predictable force in our lives. Nothing remains the same. Nothing. Ever.

I tell myself when I am in a wonderful mood that I want it to last forever.

I’d like the rule of life: nothing remains the same, to dissolve for me, but it never has and never will. Thank God! Because sometimes when I am in an awful mood or in an awful time of my life, I fear it won’t ever end, I fear I’ll be stuck in this miserable place forever.

That has never happened! Never! Change always finds a way to intervene.

Sometimes it’s like a slow-moving ocean wave, and sometimes more like a fast-moving uppercut. This is the nature of change. Sometimes we have control over the speed of change. And very often it’s totally out of our control.

Sometimes it appears we are able to negotiate our way through hard times all by ourselves, but very often we can’t. Sometimes, in hindsight, we realize we should have asked for help, which often is not our strongest skill. We need each other or things simply won’t change…except for the worse. Often our downhill changes happen incrementally, out of our awareness.

Here is one of my favorite wisdoms on this subject:

I don’t know who discovered water
but I am sure it wasn’t the fish.

-author unknown

Whatever we’re immersed in, we aren’t able to see. We’re immersed in it! And we can’t fix what we can’t see.

This one is my favorite definition of hitting bottom, which is when we finally decide to make the courageous move out of darkness into the light:

Hitting bottom is when our spiral down
is going faster than our ability
to lower our standards.

-Rabbi Shais Taub

Wow!

Now, back to autumn.

It doesn’t last forever, so we must remember to celebrate its magnificence while it’s here. Leaf by leaf. This is one of our primary jobs in life: to acknowledge and appreciate the beauty surrounding us each and every day. I want every one of us to achieve at least a B in Gratitude 101. Some days will be harder than others, but the amount of gratitude that surrounds us rarely falls out of the B range. Keep looking.

This morning the sun was shining brightly out the window to the north. Not a cloud in the sky. Then I went on the porch to get more firewood, glanced to the south and it was dark and pouring rain in our front yard!

Bright sunshine in our back yard. Pouring rain in our front yard. You can relate to this. This is the way life is delivered to us.

Our dark rainy days and our bright sunny days are gifts, but too much of either one can be “too much.”

I just took a pause in my writing and went into the backyard to chop some kindling wood, which is one of my greatest joys in life. On the stroll to the woodpile, I saw many, many tiny green grass sprouts that we just planted a few weeks ago. They are making their way into the light.

Increments. Awareness. Change. Seasons. B or B+ in Gratitude 101. Maybe even an A. Please. Life. Shine on.

Blessings…

– Burt Gershater is a local counselor, leadership trainer, speaker and writer. He can be reached at info@burtgershater.com

This article appears in Source Weekly November 7, 2024.