Daily Gratitude: More on persistence. I learned this (again) during Vol State this year. There wasn’t any time that the race was easy this year. Sometimes they were a bit easier than others but never easy. This was my own doing since I made myself really push on day 1 and because of that i sacrificed a lot and was paying for it through the rest of the race. If you were following, you’ll remember my “gut incident” on the side of the road in the middle of the night just outside of Shelbyville. For about the next 24 hours I stopped any intake (food and liquids) so the incident didn’t repeat. That, of course, led to other problems. Fortunately by this point in the race I had refocused myself enough to simply think about getting some rest and then gradually starting my intake again. I knew I had to keep going. And since I was focused on the present moment, I was able to handle that without worrying about what was going to happen in another day or three. That’s how I handled each difficulty as it arose. I did my best to keep from getting bogged down.

Daily Gratitude: When this happens and you have to fight a battle again and again, take a few minutes to look and see if there’s a message there. Is there something you keep doing that gets you into this same situation repeatedly? What are you missing? Often the lesson keeps showing up because you haven’t learned what you’re supposed to learn. This may be hard to take but I think if you look at your past experiences, you’ll see how this has happened before. The sooner you accept this, the quicker you can change your life.

Daily Gratitude: This is a follow-on to yesterday’s post. What goes through your mind when you travel over a bumpy road? Something like “why can’t they keep the potholes filled up?” Or “when are they going to fix this?” Do we think about what it took to build that road in the first place or what it takes to do the repairs? Remember the last time you were slowed down by construction? How happy were you then? Never satisfied is where we are now. We had a tiny taste of what people define as “sacrifice” during the pandemic when all our favorite things weren’t always available. Same with the last power outage. We’re often so impatient and unappreciative of all that has gone before to get us to where we are now. Just think about not having indoor plumbing in the middle of winter or no phones at all. What if you had to somehow travel
Miles to get to the market to get your food supplies? Next time you start to grumble about anything, take a deep breath and be grateful for all that’s making your life easier.