Some part of me is feeling a little sad today: I have to take down my pieces from the patterns exhibit, and though they'll be keeping some of them for possible future sales I'm sad none of them sold this time around.Plus I got a call yesterday to inform me that I wouldn't be making the second round of interviews for a job I interviewed for before we left. I suspect, since the first interview went swimmingly well, that age is the issue, but there's not much I can do about that.
In addition, I spent a couple of hours looking at jobs yesterday, and couldn't find anything that seemed to match my skills and interests -- although it may be that my feeling of discouragement was coloring my search.
So it was heartening this morning to read this passage from Rilke's Letters To a Young Poet:
You mustn't be frightened... if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside of you?
Like these three buddhas, who smiled down upon us as we ate one of our many family dinners last week, these words have a way of releasing something in me and letting it float free. Today -- and at that dinner -- the something is worry about money (it was a VERY expensive trip). Tomorrow it could be something completely different that worries me; the worries have a way of cycling through a litany of concerns.
But despite the worries a certain amount of calm remains, a soft serenity and trust that things are transpiring just as they should; that good things will emerge from trial, that the closed doors I seem to be facing right now just mean I need to turn to another direction, where open doors will await me. And in the meantime, I give thanks that I am home, and warm, and there's a sweet tuxedo cat sleeping on my wrists as I type. Life may have its challenges, but it is also full of blessings.
2 comments:
It is so disheartening when an interview goes well and then one is not given a call-back. Perhaps the best take on it is that it's one moment of many in a lifetime, it has passed, and there's a whole world out there, just waiting. You have so much to offer; the company that can't see that is the loser, big time. The company that hires you for what you bring to the job will be the right one.
Diane ... sorry for the disappointment but glad Rilke was there for you. How hard it is to remember that these disappointments are the universe guiding us in a different direction. How much easier it would be if it would simple grab a bullhorn and tell us why these things happen.
Better days ahead.
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