Resilience

Sometimes it can take a great deal to inspire us. I think it's only human that we can become bogged down by life and by the weight it carries. Life has a way of becoming monotonous, spirit depleting, and routine. It's almost an assumed part of life, an expectation, that one day you'll grow up to have a typical adult life that will require a schedule and a sense of normalcy depicted by uniformity, by the work schedule, by the chores, and by the generic routines we all follow.  Our lives practically work against us, rarely giving us a break to go on an experience. Our work schedule, our responsibilities, and our bills all prohibit any sense of unpredictability or risk taking, which is terribly unfortunate. It takes work to be unpredictable, to go on adventures and enjoy new things.
Perhaps then, we must learn to find inspiration in the little things. We have to find inspiration in the daily tasks we experience, like the sunsets we see on our way home from work, or the way it feels to kiss our spouse before bed. Even the ordinary things can be extraordinary if we only allow them to be. I think even now, as I sit in my office and go about writing this, that I feel a sense of fallout in my heart thinking about how normal my life has become. I rarely feel inspired and I rarely feel a spark. I constantly find myself wishing I could go somewhere else, experience something new for a time. But even then, would I allow myself to enjoy the new experiences, or continue to be dreary over what awaits me on my return?
But life is all about what you make it.
It's difficult to train ourselves when we need to. It's unbelievable to think about how easily we can manipulate our own minds to believe certain things about ourselves and about others, but when we must actively work to train our minds to behave and believe a certain thing, it feels impossible. And that is just it, our minds are powerful. Our minds have the ability to work against us and to ignore us when we need to change our state of thinking. It's frustrating, but in that same breath, I remind myself that our spirits are also resilient. There is surely truth to the statement that God never puts us through more than we can handle. The world that we reside in is imperfectly human, but God blessed us with a resilient nature, because He knew that the road would be difficult.
And that's what we must remember. Life may be routine and sometimes traumatic, fraught with betrayals, loss, and disappointment, but it is also full of little pieces of inspiration and grace. We can hunt for the adventures or we can find them in our everyday lives. We must always remember to be gracious, not matter what the circumstances are, especially when things become routine. The road is difficult, it's unpaved, it's rolling up and down and side to side, but we were given a strength that can only be described as divinely given. Resilient. That is what we are.