The Calm After the Storm
“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”
Willa Cather
“You learn to know a pilot in a storm.” Lucius Aneaeus Seneca
We have survived the storm. The sun is rising in a perfectly white sky, as though all the color has been washed away. Trees and grass are emerald green and even the pavement outside my house looks swept clean. The birds, who were silent yesterday, shoulders turned into the storm, are singing and all the world looks new. It is the calm after the storm.
Storms in our lives are like that, too. We receive a diagnosis, wake up in the hospital after a heart-attack, watch the door close on a cherished relationship, see the last of our children drive off to college or the military, and we wonder how we will bear this. And yet we endure—we stand and clean up the debris and start over anew.
Sometimes in the midst of a storm, we ‘learn to know the pilot.’ We find that, in our time of greatest weakness, we are resourceful, stalwart, and strong. We can bring focus and determination to bear on the crisis. After the storm ends we look back and say, “I can’t believe I did all that.” Sometimes our whole self-image changes as a result of having survived the struggle.
Bruce Barton wrote, “It takes a real storm in the average person’s life to make him realize how much worrying he has done over the squalls.” Once we have prevailed in a ‘real storm’ we have a different standard of importance, different criteria for determining what we call a crisis. There is a new sense of, “I can handle this.”
I hope your life is calm today, but if it is not, I trust that you will call upon the resources available to you within and without. You are never alone and this storm, like all storms, will eventually blow itself out.
Keeping the faith,
Jane
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