The terrible gift of a terrible illness is that it has in fact taught me to live in the moment. But when I look at these mementos, I realize that I am learning more than to seize the day. In losing my future, the mundane began to sparkle. The things I love — the things I should love — become clearer, brighter. This is transcendence, the past and the future experienced together in moments where I can see a flicker of eternity. So instead of New Year’s resolutions, I drew up a list for 2019 of experiences that had already passed: a record not of self-mastery but of genuine surprise. 1. My oncology nurse became a dear friend. 2. Even in the hospital I felt the love of God. 3. Zach is under the impression that I never get tired. These are my small miracles scattered like bread crumbs, the way forward dotting the path behind me. How Cancer Changes Hope

Hard to know if those of us not experiencing ‘the terrible gift of a terrible illness’ can actually grasp the idea of looking behind us for ‘small miracle breadcrumbs’ that show us the way forward; to some we have all been through some terrible times in 2020. May be by creating this list we can gather up some small miracles from a year we mostly want to forget? This might give us a glimpse of ‘seeing eternity’ through our experience of the past into the future. A moving piece, that had us understanding what transcendence could mean when grounded in the reality of the impermanence of life.

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This Daily Stillness has been recycled from previously published ones:

#tds1298 A list of the ways in which the way forward dots the path behind us (Jan 18, 2019)

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