Oh, this has been a TIME!

I just did a 5 year review, an exercise I do every so often when I start to wonder how I got where I am. I learned this process when I was doing the steps of recovery and it has become something of a habit.

Here is how my scientific review process works.

  1. I make a timeline with the years marked on it. Then I go through and make a mark where events happened that seem significant.

2. These are personal events, like moving to the DC area from the gorgeous little town of Staunton, which I loved living in, to have more taste of city life (I am a small town girl by nature, but I have lived in Houston and Nashville and enjoyed both. Well, can you say you enjoy Houston? You can say you had an experience in Houston. That works.)

And then having a series of eye surgeries and my old dogs die 6 months apart and moving again in the middle of early covid.

3. And then there were the not personal to me—the aforementioned covid, plus the election, plus I saw people going to the insurrection with my own eyes pre-dawn on Jan. 6, plus what the heck?

Back to me: another move AND a spectacular ankle break.

4. Then I step back and took a little look at the timeline, looking for patterns.

I have managed to avoid much illness and most surgeries—until the last 3 years. Oy. I’m ready to avoid them again.

I also have had a swell time with my kids, discovering that all those years of kid care actually DO have a huge reward. My older son’s girlfriend moved in last fall and now we all live two buildings apart in our cozy little apartment community, visiting when we want and also not visiting when we don’t want.

I got my Fiona—the nutty, funny, Lucille Ball of rough collies. She has gotten on my last nerve AND kept us all laughing. I have never met such a friendly, goofy dog before. As my son’s girlfriend describes her, she hasn’t met you yet, but she loves you already! Everyone in the community knows Fiona and kids, other dogs, and adults alike are ALL her best friends.

I’ve worked with amazing people, ghost written one book, and collaborated on several others, some of which are now off to the loving ministrations of agents. I published two of my own books and am working on a third.

5. What do I see in all this? What are the patterns?

I see grit.

No, not the grit that gets in your eye.

I see the kind of grit that Angela Duckworth talks about in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

Grit isn’t a glamorous thing.

It is the willingness to buckle down and get on with business.

While we are all seeking our calling and following our passions and envisioning our best and brightest lives, Duckworth talks about what it takes to achieve those things.

Good, old fashioned sticking to it. Making mistakes. Having setbacks. Starting all over. Being disappointed. Being shocked by the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition.

But never being completely daunted.

Oh, sure, stopped from time to time for a short pause while you have a three and a half hour surgery on your ankle.

But letting your PT bully you into getting up on that leg that actually doesn’t hold you again and again until it does.

Writing your book, revising it over and over, letting your editor bully you into writing it better, even if you curse her as you go. Letting the confusion of what seems like endless interactions of drafts wash over you—and writing it again.

Oh, this isn’t romantic! This life! It is an endurance trial! It is discouraging! It is a rough go!

I lost one of my best friends this year after a short and vigorous battle against cancer. He went as gracefully as one can.

I know for a fact that he would have loved to have gone on with the endurance trial quite a lot longer. He would have relished the chance to learn even more about challenges.He would have loved to get knocked down quite a few more times.

Because there is joy in grit. There is enormous satisfaction.

That is what my timeline told me.