“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” -Emily Dickinson

My goal for the day was to enjoy it. I am working to break things down to the most basic elements, to not get pulled off course. In recent days, my business aspirations have been building to a crescendo and I am certain that life will be different soon. I wake up with my prayers for gratitude, full and vibrant. I don’t have to search for it. But then as the day unfolds and I hurry to catch up to the competing requests and problem solving details that define the life of a small business, I lose the thread.

Over and over, I repeat my mantra: I feel so lucky that I get to do this work, trying to recapture the ease with which gratitude came this morning. Sometimes the repetition sounds hollow even to me and I make myself stop, I make myself remember that this moment of this day is all there is. It is odd how my joy of just doing the work can be replaced often without me noticing it by some urgency to succeed, to prove myself, to get it right. When I am not paying attention the shift is almost imperceptible.

Difficulties are part of the path; any path. Living is like licking honey off a thorn, it is sweet and sharp at once. Why I can taste the sweetness sometimes and only feel the prick of pain others has less and less to do with what is happening around me. Fatigue doesn’t help and multi-tasking seems to make it worse, because then the thread can be lost for long enough that I don’t even know that I lost it.

An evangelical minister Charles R. Swindoll once said: “The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our attitudes.”

So tomorrow I will start out again, committed to making it a good day.