Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt:  What blessings can I count right now?

I’m in a better place today to write about blessings than I have been over the last couple of days.  I had a good night’s sleep.  My eyes aren’t as itchy today from the rampant tree sex, I mean, pollen.   It was a gorgeous day out today, and that meant for a lovely walk.   I’ve now been painting the scroll for the Bardic War after wrapping up the text drafting (in Latin) this morning.

Larger blessings?  I have my first dose of vaccine.  I have music to listen to, books to read.  My health is decent.  I will not waste this day;  things I will do will have meaning for others and for me as well.

But an important thing about counting blessings for me is also acknowledging what’s still hard.  I do not believe “things happen for a reason”.  Sometimes things just suck.  No one is requiring martyrdom.  No one is requiring you to just keep smiling.   Sometimes it’s enough to just keep going–or even to just be for awhile.  And being able to do that?  To sit with the bad things and to acknowledge their existence, and to allow yourself to feel?  That’s a blessing of its own.  Because I believe it’s not just emotions like joy that make us human, it’s also despair and sadness, and what being able to feel brings out in us–because it’s in learning to make peace with these emotions that you develop true empathy.  (This sounds like part of the plot for Inside Out, for sure, but that’s one of the reasons why that movie is a masterpiece.)

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A perfect spring day today, and I got out for a walk.  Saw many, many more trilliums in the woods along the escarpment, along with a few other flowers.

Meanwhile, the case trend still is heading slowly downward.  But the province did a record number of vaccinations yesterday, so there is that.  The fact that it is going down slowly still tells me we’re not getting the vaccine out to the area where the impact will be greatest–although we’re not likely yet seeing the impact of sending half of the supplies to hotspots for the last couple of weeks.

This evening, I put on the improv section of the Bardic War while I worked on the scroll for the wordsmith/scribe/herald relay.  I got to see our side take the point, laughed quite a bit, and have the scroll all but completed.  There’s a little bit of cleanup to do, but it’s 95% there.  Since it’s a backlog scroll, I can share it.  (I’ll take a better photo later;  it looks like the writing is crooked and it actually isn’t.)