Noticing the Small Things

There are days that I look at my morning journal writing and wonder how I can pick myself up and move through the day.

I see the grief, the challenges, the apparent lack of tools in my toolbox. The tricky thing is that truth is bound up with illusion here. Grief is real. Challenge is a mix of truth and illusion. And tools - I have many. Heck, I teach this stuff. We teach what we need to learn, and that personal experience with whatever it is makes for authentic teaching. 

When the big picture feels overwhelming, I tend to focus in on small things. The way I see it is as a superpower, like a comic book character whose eye is suddenly the focus of the artist and she shows through her illustrations how the power works. 

It looks something like this - the edges of my vision begin to darken as my super focus begins to activate. All the distraction and disruption are absorbed by that darkness and quieting, as my eye catches a small pleasure in front of me that grows to fill my whole field of vision. It is all I can see for a time. Its abundance reorients my thinking.   

So, the unopened bag of cherries in my fridge becomes joy that is just waiting for me to reach for it. The sprigs of tarragon in the fridge become potential that is waiting for me to transform it into something amazing. The text message I just sent my son about getting together this week becomes a thread of connection. 

Joy. Potential. Connection.

The reorientation of my thinking. 

Neither grief nor challenge disappears completely. They simply become something other than the focus when I am vulnerable to thoughts that can undermine my wholeness. 

During yesterday's preaching I was working with two stories, one from the Old Testament and one from the New. The first in Lamentations was easy to relate to compared to the second from Mark's gospel about two miraculous cures. We know the lament so well. The cure feels more elusive. The grace of the second story, even though it's harder to relate to, has to do with Jesus helping us to see what had, before, been hidden from our eyes - the embodied presence of grace offering a healing touch to an impossible situation.

I asked, "What becomes possible when we trust grace to be present? To touch a situation with a healing presence? " 

It becomes possible to tell a healing story, even before healing happens. The story makes it come alive for us, enables us to see it, and if we can see it, we can move toward it.   

A healing story makes something other than the present challenge and grief our primary experience. It enables healing to begin as our thoughts imagine something else. 

And if we can see it, we can move toward it.

A Hundred Years of Happiness is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience. 

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.