Some Free Advice

I love you. I accept you. I praise you. Those are words I keep returning to, and I wonder how many people can actually say them out loud to another person. For that matter, can you say them to yourself?

When something comes up that worries me, I have a small routine. I pray over it. I make an effort to hold a positive thought about how it might go. And I tell myself, flat out, that I will take whatever comes. That is the whole of my advice for today. Nobody said any of it was easy. It is simply the best I have managed to come up with for my own use.

Getting to this spot took me years, and I would not claim I have fully arrived. I still catch myself drifting and have to repeat my own instructions back to me. There was a long stretch when I feared my prayers were going nowhere. My mind would lock onto the worst possible outcome and refuse to let go. And when things fell apart in a way I didn't want, accepting it felt almost impossible.

Here is a piece of it I keep tripping over: what is wrong for me may be exactly right for someone else. People often ignore the advice I hand them, and maybe they're wise to. They don't see the situation through my eyes, so why should my conclusion fit their life? If I won't sign on with a particular group, or if a friend warns me off a vacation spot because their own trip there soured, that still leaves room for each of us to decide on our own terms.

It brings me back to college, sitting in those classrooms. One student would rave about a professor and another would groan at the mention of the same name. I learned not to borrow either verdict wholesale. Their experience told me very little about what mine would turn out to be.

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