"Forgive them, Father, for they do not know what they are doing." Sometimes I have to think that at work because when one of the residents becomes upset at me for whatever reason, they literally don't know what they are doing. That is, they may get mad at me for me making them go to the bathroom that moment, but the next day nothing happened, because in their mind it never happened. They understand that yesterday happened, but the details don't quite make it into the equation; the fact that yesterday happened is enough. Not that forgiveness should exactly be "selective amnesia" or anything of that sort, but I do think that forgiveness is meant to operate in much the same manner as the innocence of a child or the forgetfulness of the elderly. Let yesterday be yesterday, let yesterday exist in yesterday, do not let it exist in today. Today is enough. Tomorrow will be enough when it comes.
Easier said than done, of course, but it's a good thing to think about. Living one day at a time helps me to get through days of work before going home (3 days! 3 days!). If I had started out this past week looking at the whole week, I would've been overwhelmed. And since it's hard for me to live in today, I did narrow myself to two days at a time. "Just these two days, then I can focus on the next two days." I'm in the middle of one of those two day stretches. It made sense in my mind this week to break it up in such a fashion because this morning and tomorrow I worked/will be working on one floor of the nursing home, and the weekend I'll be on a different shift on a different floor of the nursing home. So two day segments just fit naturally into the week.
Speaking of natural, I've been reading The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly. Overall a good book. It's basically a motivational book that happens to be written by a Catholic, so has an underlying spiritual health theme to the message. Matthew Kelly is a renowned speaker, and I can tell the book is written much like he must talk in his speeches; short and poignant. For that reason I don't think the book has the rhythm (see what I did there? Punny.) of a book; it seems as if I'm reading a speech of his. In fact, it would probably be much more effective to hear him talk than to read his writing. Short choppy sentences tend to irritate me after a while. However, the message is good and timely in today's world and in my life, and has been a nice read thus far. Lately I've been doing my leisure reading at work when I have free time at the end of my regular evening shift and studying for the GRE the rest of the time when I'm not at work. Which reminds me: the next time I decide to shut off my Facebook account to avoid distraction from studying/living, I must remember to let my mom know too, so that she doesn't think a) something tragic has happened in my life, b) I'm blocking her, or c) I've basically ceased living. Yup. She definitely texted me in a panicked state of mind and called me in bit of a calmer mood after I had texted her that I was in fact alive and well. (And the break has been good so far; deactivating the account has been much more effective than just saying I'm taking a break and allowing myself to sneak on occasionally to look at status updates. I've used Facebook more often than I wanted to this summer to avoid a disconnection with the world, so I figure a good 31-ish day break is definitely a good thing to break the horrible habit of addiction to Facebook.)
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