Accountability for our blessings…. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently especially with my kids because their lives are amazing! Of course, they’re my kids and their lives have always been amazing so they don’t know any different. I worry sometimes that they won’t realize the opportunities that they have right in front of them and will let them slip by. I try to point out to them the opportunities that are sitting right in their lap, hoping that they will at least take advantage of it now and appreciate it later. I had many opportunities that were sitting right in my lap when I was younger and didn’t realize what they were, now looking back on my life sometimes I want to smack myself in the head. That being said….every step I took brought me to the place that I’m at right now and I wouldn’t change that for anything, my life is perfectly enough. However, maybe I could have taken a more direct route and not such scenic route to get here.
The hard part about blessings is they sometimes don’t present themselves as blessings. Sometimes the presentation looks like hardship or unfairness, pain. hurt…. Because we have these human bodies with limited senses anytime we are uncomfortable for any reason we interpret it as something negative. We try to run away from it, or we try to get rid of that thing that’s making us uncomfortable. We perceive it as a problem, and we’ll look for something out there outside of us to fix it. This does not work because 1. Its not a “problem” but two the solution to perceived problem is always inside you. Our society has trained us to look for someone or something outside of us to give us our answers. If you are presented with a perceived problem, you also have the solution and that may be the blessing your life is trying to show you right now.
I’ve learned a lot by being around my animals especially my horses. Horses don’t have problems they just have situations, and they react to the situation by trying to restore balance. Its not good or bad, it just is and if its uncomfortable they try to rebalance. They don’t dwell in the past; they don’t worry about the future they try and stay in balance right here and now. If I fly is biting them on the bum they may swat it with their tail, find a tree to rub or they will ask a friend for help. They won’t then dwell on the fact that none of the other horses offered to help them or why is this fly picking on them or do I smell bad, is something wrong with me…. they just fix it so they can be balanced again. When I look back on my life at periods of discomfort or perceived stress or unhappiness and then I think about the outcome that came later oftentimes it was a blessing.
Here is a fun example. Many moons ago when I chose to go to nursing school, I chose to go to Ohio from Florida… yes you read that correctly, to go to Kent State where I knew absolutely no one instead of going to the University of Tampa where I had a good friend an oncology nurse that would let me live with her. There was one reason that I went to Ohio that I won’t go into now but I had grown up in Florida, and really had no memory of what it was like to live in snow. There were some dramatic changes that happened once I moved to Ohio that were perceived stressors and the first snow that came…omg I was so depressed. I started nursing school it was not what I thought. As a nursing student we were treated awful at some of the hospitals, and I was miserable. I hated Ohio, I had no friends, I didn’t like nursing school I felt like I had made the biggest mistake of my life. But once I start something, I finish it and I was going to finish nursing school and then decide what to do next. The blessing in this is that I had none of the distractions I would have had if stayed in Florida such as…I don’t know, the beach, nice weather and friends. So, finishing nursing school was quite easy. See blessings! I’m not trying to be totally Pollyanna and sometimes things do suck. More often than not, the things that suck, really don’t, you just haven’t seen the next page of the book yet. Try and refocus yourself, try and look at situations with a positive light because negativity for sure, never fixes anything.
With Love,
Dr. Stefanie Maass PhD.,ENP-C, FNP, NREMT,FAARM
“Blessing sometimes show up in unrecognizable disguises”
–Janette Oke
