the rough places smooth?
Today started with some form of productivity, then lapsed into a headache, a bath and then an email which caused a flood of tears. Why am I sharing this on my tiny space on the internet? Well, I promised myself I would start writing again, and would just hit publish with whatever comes out, and also because life is not all dandy 90% of the time.
I just got off the phone with a friend and during the conversation I was talking about how so often in life you get knocked down and you pick yourself back up again.
Right now where I am in life, I feel like I get knocked down every few months and honestly I am quite tired of picking myself back up again.
I always have a pretty picture in my mind of what I think life should look like, what I would like to do, achieve, be, have and look like. A image of this life that I have conjured from somewhere that would be so idyllic and perfect and where I would be content. Where I should be now I am 30. (Irony of the last post I wrote)
2020 is not that life. But if I am honest neither were the 30 years before that.
Life isn’t a picture frame, 20 minute Friends episode where everything sorts itself out by the end of the show. I am beginning to realise life is all of it. The absolutely crap moments, with the idyllic ones mixed in. I’m not pretending this is news to anyone. You all know that.
But I needed to write this out. Life is each moment; each tear, each word, each laugh, each dance round the kitchen. It is all of it, and right now when I feel like my life is at the biggest cross roads I needed to write that down.
I have a tattoo inked onto my inner elbow on my right arm, written in my fathers handwriting ‘Isaiah 42:16’ - the words of this bible verse have followed me for the past 14 years:
“I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.”
I will make the rough places smooth…. somehow picking myself up again, after what feels like another mountain in a curved road, is the way to the rough places becoming smooth. Somehow the lessons learnt in therapy, the conversations with friends that calm me down and the texts telling me it’ll be okay are the way to the rough places becoming smooth again.
Maybe this is what life is, and maybe it is okay to take the time to wallow in the pain, to acknowledge the darkness and the rough ground, to adjust and cry and scream from a mountain-top ( highly highly recommend this if you can do it- such a stress reliever). But then for me at least, looking down to my father’s handwriting and remembering that the God I believe in promises darkness to light, rough to smooth and unfamiliar paths.
R.
