Jan says at RevGals: I am currently reading a book entitled Stairway of Surprise: Six Steps to a Creative Life by Michael Lipson. His premise is a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "I shall mount to paradise by the stairway of surprise." Lipson's book is about practicing or developing six inner functions--thinking, doing, feeling, loving, opening, and thanking.
So these categories of attention are a jumping off point for today's Friday Five:
Pick five of the six actions and write about how you are practicing them today or recently. For a bonus, write about the sixth one you originally didn't choose!
What or how are you:
1. thinking? Thinking about my friend Kirstin, who is travelling her last journey due to metastatic melanoma. You want to read some amazing writing about life and death, go visit her blog. Since her diagnosis in 2008, she has been regularly blowing my mind (and those of hundreds of others).
2. doing? Working, slowly, on summer projects at work and at home.
3. feeling? how precious life is.
4. loving? My husband, who loves me no matter what, and who always thanks me for little things I do for him.
5. opening? A door into the future. I don't know what it will look like in there, and here's the funny thing...we NEVER know what the future will look like. It's just that most days we don't realize we are opening doors. We bumble along assuming all will be the same from day to day, until, suddenly or slowly, it's not.
I'll have a new boss as of July 1, and there are other changes afoot. I feel confident that God is in all of them, and when there are days I don't feel so confident, I know there are others standing by as this door swings wide. People who will walk in with me, who'll come to meet me and bring me a bottle of water for the road.
6. thanking? Singing. I wake up with songs in my head, mostly from scripture. Sometimes they roll around until they just have to be sung. Often this happens when I'm walking the dogs. (They don't seem to mind.)
