The one thing we can really control in life

On mornings like this, when the temperature is cool and the humidity low, I like to open the door to the back yard and listen to the world before it wakes up. 

The house faces East/West, so as the sun creeps over the trees the light shines through the picture window and bathes the room in a golden glow.

The coffee percolates and fills the room with the cinnamon tinted scent of promises yet fulfilled.

The crows like to call in the morning. 

On usual days, as most days must be, there are crows queued up on the fence crackling their call in an imperfect imitation of roosters. 

I'll sit with an oversized cup of coffee in one hand and my brainstorm book in the other, practicing the items I preach in trying to capture dreams, and thoughts, and fragments left over from an overactive brain at night.

This day was not usual.

The song this morning was a sparrow, I think.

 A tiny little gray brown bird that flittered around the screened in enclosure, resting on the hose holder, and Adirondack chairs as it peeked in the back.

It's song was more melodious than the caw of the screeching caw of the crows. It trilled and echoed through the open back door.

I have been praying and meditating a lot lately about things. 

We all have "things" in our lives, those moments that don't quite go as we plan, or wish. 

A tiny thousand little stressors that add up to lost hair, and lost sleep. 

Perhaps it is magnified by being an indie, self employed owner of a business that requires a lot of attention, hunting for freelance work for cash to carry through the months that are traditionally slower in a publishing cycle.

Compound that with a move, and travel, and trading time for dollars, and fear. 

Most of all fear.

Moving back to Arkansas is a change. 

Moving in with someone after eight years alone is a change.

Building a business when it seems slow and the walls pop up without the safety net of a corporate paycheck is a change.

Fear.

I normally work through fear by suppressing feelings, balling them up until they spill out in a cascade of sweat after an 18 mile run. 

But an Achilles injury that won't go away prohibits anything longer than ten. 

And you can write the word change on the page as much as you like, but that doesn't have the same cathartic feeling.

Reason dictates that change happens no matter what you do.

It's a fact, like gravity and sunrises. 

It's impossible to argue with gravity. though you might fight it's effects with wings and chutes, lifts and motors, gravity always wins. 

No matter how much you wish it to change, or even what direction you face, the sun will always rise in the East.

When it does, everything is different. 

The world is spinning on an axis in just a little bit different position in the solar system, which is itself in a galaxy that is spinning in a new location in a universe in a constant state of expansion.

Old cells slough off, replaced by new, muscles age and atrophy, break down and repair, each moment everyone is one second older in a never ending march through life. 

Thoughts change as we learn new things, people change as they age, the majority sliding into a mode of safe conservatism, comfortable in mind.

Fear and change. 

Fear of change. 

Which by it's nature should not be feared, because that is exactly what life is, a constant state of change.

This morning, something changed. 

If one is to read the signs from the gods and believes in portents, the tiny sparrow played the part of an alarm clock against the crows. 

As I sat with coffee cup in hand, I heard a flutter and glanced over.

The sparrow had winged in the open door and perched on the edge of moving box inside the dining room. 

It quirked it's head first one way, then the other in that curious way that birds and dogs do, and twittered out a little song.

And just as quick it turned and left.

What did it mean?

Find pleasure in the little things?

Be grateful for opportunities that come disguised?

Revel in the fact that things happen we can't explain, and accept the smile it brings.

Change happens.

Our only control is the reaction.

Join me onPATREON and share the journey.