if today you hear his voice harden not your hearts.
Not hearing much of anything this week–not beyond the ordinary sounds of a house during my daughter’s half-term break. Half-term for a lone working parent is its own kind of penance, I suppose. It hasn’t helped that she’s been sick, nor that I had a full day of meetings yesterday, nor that I am under a significant amount of pressure from various work-related angles. It also doesn’t help that she has an older sister who demands a considerable amount of attention and help with personal care. All in all, half term is a week that is entirely outwardly-focused and devoid of any time for the solo walks that allow my brain to keep functioning. It is a step beyond penance into the realm of the psyche-destroying and soul-obscuring. Which is where I am now: mentally tangled and soul-obscured.
The thing is, I am uneasy about the obsession with our happiness, the thirst for self-fulfilment that is all but normative in the modern, majority world. I don’t think it is our proper orientation–more like a broken compass that leads us ever astray. The path to happiness and self-fulfilment is not in the pursuit of either of those things. Where I am stuck at the moment is in the process of working out how to live in a way that leads to peace, which is not the same as either happiness or self-fulfilment. Not the same–deeper than either and essential to both. How to find peace in the midst of the stress, as I am pulled in different directions by everything and everyone around me–that’s the question. And I confess that I am no closer to answering it than I was when I first became a mother.
Sigh. It is time, now, to return to the fray and hope I am not pulled apart completely today by the forces that tug me this way and that.
Kyrie eleison.