Tag Archives: despair

Just When I Begin to Sink into Despair…

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Just when I begin to sink into despair, something happens that fills me all up with joy and hope. It’s only noon, and already my day has been filled with Good, with the recognition that nothing – absolutely NOTHING – can stop Love from reaching us and blessing us.

A really remarkable thing happened this morning right after I got myself out of bed and dressed. (I had considered just staying there for another hour or two – but this voice told me to get up – that something good was coming!) There was a knock on the door and Scott went to answer it. I heard him talking to a woman, and then I heard him ask the woman if she wanted to talk to me.

I went to the door and saw one of my former eighth graders standing there! Diana had been in my first class of eighth graders in Burlington – back in 1992! I hadn’t seen her for maybe twenty or thirty years! She told me that she’s living in Minnesota now, but she’s home to visit her mom, and she just had to stop in and see me.

And pretty soon we were hugging and crying and it was such a beautiful coming together that my heart just filled up with joy. Diana told me that she’d been wanting to write me, but the words just never came, so she’d decided to talk to me in the person. She told me that her eighth grade year with me had been the most important year in her life and it had stayed with her. She said I’d made a difference in her life – that I’d treated all of my students like I was their mother, and I’d nurtured them like they were my children. She said she’d never had that from a teacher before and it had meant something to her, and she wanted me to know that.

She remembered at the beginning of the school year when I’d invited all the parents and students in to meet me how I’d walked around with my baby (he would have been about nine months then) on my back, and how he’d burped up baby stuff on my shoulder, and how I’d laughed about it. She said she’d never met another teacher like me before. 😃

Diana was a gift from the Cosmos this morning. The love in our space was palpable.

“Despair not; for Love IS with thee.”

“I don’t need to claim these thoughts!”

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“Stand porter at the door of thought.”
– Mary Baker Eddy

I was in a funk today. There’s been another Christmas tragedy. Don’t want to talk about that, really. But it led me to some dark places in my thoughts. I stopped by to see Dad, hoping that would cheer me up. But he was struggling – questioning the veracity of a Christmas card I brought him from a friend, saying it seemed “fishy” – questionable – and he didn’t trust it. He argued with me about the background in a photograph – insisted it was a stadium with bleachers – which… it wasn’t. I told him I loved him, and he told me he loved me, and I left.

As I was driving home dark thoughts came knocking on the door of my consciousness – thoughts of despair and discouragement and fear for the future. Thoughts about death. And I felt afraid and guilty that I was even having these thoughts. And then I had this moment of clarity: “But I don’t need to claim these thoughts as mine! Just because these thoughts knocked on my door doesn’t mean they belong to me! They aren’t any part of me!” I realized I could choose whether I wanted to let those thoughts enter and be part of my identity, or not.

A decade ago, when I was going through a massive depression, I felt I didn’t have a choice – I felt I didn’t have control over the thoughts that came into my head, and the feelings of despair and hopelessness and guilt – and it all seemed overwhelming at times. But I acquired some tools for dealing with life’s challenges and struggles during that time. First, I learned not to fight my feelings – that only seemed to make the feelings bigger – but to let myself surf on top of them. I learned I could be happy even when I was sad.  And I learned a trick from Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now that was really helpful, too – and that I was reminded of today. In his book, Tolle writes: “Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: ‘I wonder what my next thought is going to be.’ Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now.” When I tried that experiment all those years ago (and when I tried it just now, too) – when I waited for my next thought – it didn’t come! I was filled with a blessed, peaceful stillness.

I had a healing today. And it felt like this…
healing