Dear Caminoheads,

I am so so SO SOOOO grateful that Ron didn’t give us much time to forget about the spirit of this season of thanksgiving and this season of preparation for hope, either the hope that brings the birth celebrated on Christmas or even the hope that comes with the renewal that the new year brings.

And it has been pretty difficult for me to be focused on “things going well” this year, because this year challenged massively my patience, my perseverance, even my usual willingness to connect. Much of the year has been spent inwards, and hidden under a ton of work; two attitudes that have brought some rewards but in no way resolve the difficulties, in no way address the roots of them, and what is worse, these attitudes have taken me farther away from analyzing the possibility of resolutions.

And here is a key thing, one more time, the harsh reality of that statement that I was told in my first year at university: “the most difficult thing to do -for a health professional- is to do nothing”.  Yes. Acceptance. And that statement exceeds the fact of being a health professional, it is about Life in general, Life with capital “L”. Life requires a lot of acceptance, acceptance that the things are just what they are, that a resolution does not always exist, that there is nothing in our hands that could change the situation we are in. I struggle so much with this that my oversight director at work, recommended for my end of the year assessment that I should work on analyzing more which are the battles I have to fight and ones I have to drop…!

But there is one category of acceptance that I find the most difficult: acceptance that when there is one or more real resolutions, none of them is the the one we want. It is a bit like going to vote in the elections, lately, at least in my country, we vote whatever is “less worse”.

To find the things we are grateful for in the myriad of things we struggle to accept sounds like a distractor factor, the candies that the ones arriving after the 3rd position always receive, even a phony thing; but in fact, it is not. It is the most rationale thing ever and comes from understanding that Life, with capital “L” is difficult, that the capital “L” is not for free. Thiago de Mello, a Brazilian poet from the Amazonias, wrote a poem called “A vida verdadeira”, not sure what a good translation would be, but would be something like “A truthful life”; this poem ends saying that ” we must deserve life”. My understanding of this poem (that I couldn’t find in English) and last line is that a committed life, a life that doesn’t hide when there are adversities, a life that despite hurting also holds us together, that type of Life, must be deserved.

Gratitude then, abounds when we live a “L”ife.

“Pois aqui está a minha vida. Pronta para ser usada*” Loves,

Cris

*Thiago de Mello