30DWC - DAY 9 - These words speak to me.

Darling Magazine, as you know, rocks my socks. And in the Fall issue that came out this month, the theme of the whole issue was "Life's big question mark", and pretty much embracing that, and not being afraid of it. In the very first article under the first section, the Dreamer section, the article is titled "Waiting for the spark". One of the many inspiring lines reads as follows:

I want to experience the liberation of 

relinquishing a sense of control over my life.

The entire article is amazing, but that sentence just now stood out to me. We keep waiting for things to happen in our lives, and when things don't go our way, we seem to believe that it is the wrong thing, or that we are being steered off course of what we think our life is supposed to be. Truth is, which we all know but seem to forget, is that nothing, and I mean nothing is certain. Another day or even minute on this earth is not even guaranteed. Yet we all walk through life making plans of what we see our lives turning into and how we think everything should go. But, it will not always happen that way.

Another line from the article reads:

The danger for dreamers who plan is that we often end up 

clinging too tightly to our expectations about how life ought to unfold, 

rushing our way toward dreamed-of destinations at the 

expense of simply savoring the journey.

This is something that I have been thinking about lately, and stressing about. The fact that I always thought at like 20 that I would have everything figured out and whatever by the time I got to 25. I don't know why, but that just seemed like a reasonable age to have your shit together, and to have done a decent amount of things with your life. I even thought at one point, "I may be married by the time I'm 25. Well, I am 26 now, half way to 27, and I feel like I just graduated high school, not college. Like I just got my diploma, not a Bachelors degree. And that is very frustrating. 

The article starts off with a quote from Thomas Merton. He was a Trappist monk and writer who spent half of his life living alone in his monastery's hermitage. It says that he found freedom and fulfillment through learning to accept a solitary lifestyle in quiet observation, meditation, and prayer.

His quote reads:

What I need is the grace to cease making any kind of fuss

over anything: travel in darkness and do God's will.

God determines everything that happens in our lives, and nothing is a mystery to Him. We need to trust that he always has out best interest at heart, and that He knows what He is doing with our lives, because He does. And we should never doubt that for a second. I have been praying lately that God leads me in the right direction, or rather the direction that suits His will for my life. I ask for His strength and wisdom and patience and to lean on Him when I feel lost and confused. 

The article ends with another quote by Merton that says:

The more I leave everything to [mystery], the simpler 

everything becomes, and the easier I travel.

We are all on the journey of life, and we need to savor every moment.

- Cobb