keep on keeping on

I’ve missed the past two days in the May blogathon. There’s been a kind of personal crisis that’s gotten in the way of quite a bit lately.

Which brings me to today’s blog topic: sometimes all you can do is just keep on keeping on.

Moving to Portland was a huge change from Richmond, Virginia — where I’d grown up and where I’d lived as an adult for more than a decade. In many ways, this relocation was very good, but this change also presented some unexpected challenges. There are some things I’ve been grappling with since I got here, not the least of which was the untimely death of my beloved Alaskan husky, Nanook — followed several months later by the trials of Lakshmi, an illness in one of my cats, and the severe diabetes, seizures and ultimate death of my dog, Journey.

It’s been a year since Journey’s passing — that anniversary was this past Sunday — and there are parts of my life that are still recovering from those very difficult months of prolonged trauma and grief. My life was impacted in ways I couldn’t have imagined, and it has been a struggle to come back from all of that, as well as from some other hits I’ve taken.

But that’s life.

In the past several months, things have really begun looking up, on several fronts. It was wonderful to feel my optimism at last being rewarded. Things weren’t perfect, of course, but good things were happening, and I was really enjoying myself. I felt like I was finally firing on all cylinders in the three most important areas of my life — my work, my love life, and my health.

And then a huge wrench got thrown into the works — something completely outside my control, and I’m still not sure what the outcome might be. In the meantime, there’s frustration, anxiety, and pain involved, along with a great amount of compassion. I feel very much in limbo. The temptation to ignore pretty much everything but this current crisis is rather strong, to sink all my energy into fixing this. But I don’t have that option. It’s not my problem to fix. It’s not easy to turn my attention to the rest of my life and just let this sit, but sometimes that’s all I can do.

I grew up in a home of high drama and didn’t learn at an early age that giving something room is not the same as ignoring it, and that backing off is not necessarily the same as abandonment. I had to learn on my own that some things take time, that some problems really do need to be tackled head-on with full force, but if I find that I’m beating my head against a wall, a better strategy is to take a step back and look for a doorway through. And that no measure of love or good intention gives anyone the power to solve other people’s problems.

So I’m keeping on keeping on, or trying to. I’m working on investing my efforts in areas where I can have positive and productive impact — in hopes also of gaining a more balanced perspective on what is not within the realm of my control. I simply have to trust that the rest will work itself out.