The way to serenity often, for me, is to not obsess over what is going to happen tomorrow. The true path to happiness is to take things as they come. Often what happens in the future is not near as bad as what I envision the future to be. I like to think of the future as being a result of an infinite number of possibilities.
What really matters is what I can do now. Each decision I make affects the outcome of the future, but if I try to manipulate the path of my future, sometimes it doesn't actually go the way I intended. Better for me if I just "do the next right thing" and let God govern the way the results come. When I am transfixed on a desired outcome, I might miss some important thing I might learn from whatever is happening right now.
For instance: When I was young, after those childhood dreams of being a policeman or a fireman (and I don't even remember if I actually dreamed to be one of those, but it serves as an illustration), my biggest dream was to be a writer. And, no, my dream did not involve actually being a famous writer of worldwide renown, I just wanted to have something to be able to point to and say "Yeah, I wrote that").
I never really completed that dream until I discovered the blogosphere. Which means I just had to wait and bide my time. But in the process I took it one day at a time. Now, in truth, I don't know if anybody is actually reading any of my blogs. (Besides this one, I also am involved in writing a movie review blog on this same platform; The Midnite Drive-In.) Neither one is going to bring me prestige, but decades from now it will still be out there on the Net. And that is all I ever really wanted.
In 2017 I was privileged to also have a piece I wrote appear in print in the Grapevine, a magazine published by Alcoholics Anonymous. As I told my sponsor in the program at the time, if I had known all it took was for me to get happy with my life to get published I might have done years ago. Living for the moment, I just wrote down some thoughts on my relationship with Pennie, my cat, and submitted it to the publishers. I then just forgot about it. If it got published, OK; and if it was rejected, that too was O.K.
I have since then been privileged to be published twice more in that magazine. Both times I just let the wind take the sails wherever they might lead. What happens tomorrow, only God knows for sure, and I'm happy to let the boat go where it will.
May your spiritual journey be fruitful.
Quiggy
And you write well
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