Just Write {181}

Brandi Carlile has a new album. My favorite song is Wherever Is Your Heart.

Please forgive my mind, she sings.

Please forgive my mind.

I listened to it a few minutes ago and started to cry. Maybe because my mind, if allowed, is on a mission to destroy. I have been working hard in the midst of medical scares, divorce, sobriety, and every new and different thing, to stop my mind.

Stop. Just stop.

Almost every last thing is a thing I cannot control, so to think on these things is only torture. Thinking can be like a drug. A control drug. Because maybe if I think long and hard enough, I will things into being better, or however I imagine is best, and I’m probably wrong.

So I stop. I try to stop thinking.

I do the things I need the courage to do and I try to stop my mind. Please forgive my mind.

Sometimes stopping means having a good cry and making a phone call to a wise and trusted friend. Sometimes it means watching innumerable episodes of Friends on Netflix and allowing myself to laugh at the ridiculousness.

Stopping always means acceptance and letting go and surrender.

These would be the hardest lessons to learn, in a life. So we learn them over and over and forgive our human weakness and try again.

The heart is starved for surrender because it is beaten up by the mind so much. It needs a break.

And lately I look to my children for the wisdom to know the difference between the things I can change and the things I cannot. Motherhood is an opportunity to let go, and often feels like cramming for a Life Test. Can you do this, Mama? Can you accept the things you cannot change? Can you admit that their world is not you, but you are merely and valuably an important part of it?

Wherever is your heart, I call home.

This is the 181st installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {New here? Please see the details.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. (Then link back to this post in your Just Write post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.)

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