The present enshrines the past.

-- Simone de Beauvoir

Inspirational Short Story, Female Fantasy Art, Relaxing Music

Each of our lives is a multitude of interconnecting pieces, not unlike a mosaic. What has gone before, what will come today, are at once and always entwined.

The past has done its part, never to be erased. The present is always a composite.

In months and years gone by, perhaps we anticipated the days with dread. Fearing the worst, often we found it; we generally find that which we fear. But we can influence the mosaic our experiences create.

The contribution today makes to our mosaic can lighten its shade, can heighten its contrast, can make bold its design.

What faces us today? A job we enjoy or one we fear? Growing pains of our children? Loneliness? How we move through the minutes, the hours, influences our perception of future minutes and hours.

No moment is inviolate. Every moment is part of the whole that we are creating.

We are artists.

We create our present from influences of our past.

Follow your dream

if you stumble, don't stop

and lose sight of your goal,

press on to the top.

For only on top

Can we see the whole view.

-- Amanda Bradley

Today, we can, each of us, look back on our lives and get a glimmering of why something happened and how it fit into the larger mosaic of our lives.

And this will continue to be true for us.

We have stumbled.

We sill stumble.

And we learn about ourselves, about what makes us stumble and about the methods of picking ourselves up.

Life is a process, a learning process that needs those stumbles to increase our awareness of the steps we need to take to find our dream at the top.

None of us could realize the part our stumbling played in the past.

But now we see.

When we fall, we need to trust that, as before, our falls are "up," not down.

What we suffer, what we endure

is done by us, as individuals, in private.

-- Louise Bogan

Empathy we can give. Empathy we can find, and it comforts. Bur our pain, the depth of it, can never be wholly shared, fully understood, actually realized by anyone other than ourselves.

Alone, each of us comes to terms with out grief, our despair, even our guilt.

Knowing that we are not alone in what we suffer makes the difficulties each of us must face easier. We haven't been singled out, of that we're certain.

Remembering that our challenges offer us the lessons we need in the school of life makes them more acceptable. In time we'll even look eagerly to our challenges as the real exciting opportunities for which we've been created.

Suffering prompts the changes necessary for spiritual growth.

It pushes us like no other experience to God -- for understanding, for relief, for unwavering security.

It's not easy to look upon suffering as a gift.

And we need not fully understand it; however, in time, its value in our lives will become clear.

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10/16/2024

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