What’s in the Offing?

     2019 began with me taking on a new creative skill: bullet journaling (belovedly called bujo by its fans) . It has been quite the journey and so much fun! I started out completely intimidated by what I saw on Pintrest, and have settled on a comfortable pace of developing practical and personal pages. One of my bujo pages is called “awesome words”. They include robust words like sophrosyne, and cute but shockingly mighty words like sisu. But one of my favorite words is offing, which means the “part of the deep sea seen from the shore” or “the near or foreseeable future”. I found this to be a very curious definition.

     First of all, the word looks and sounds like a profanity, or something obscene you would do to someone you were angry at. Quite the contrary, the definition itself speaks to something you know is true even though it’s far away. To me this reflects echoes of the essence of hope. Looking out into my own future, I see the offing as strewn with smoky, cumulonimbus clouds that are  backlit with hues of amber, violet, and crimson. I sense a vibrant season of luscious sunsets calling me to cherish the journeys that have come and gone, and sit in patient expectation awaiting the brilliant bursts of sunrises that will greet me as I face new challenges. The wisdom of my current lifestyle has not come easily or effortlessly, but in my own recovery from a life of workaholism and unrestrained ambition, I have learned to value doing things easily and effortlessly.

   All our life stories are being written with impermanence, and memories of who we were are carried only on the lips of those we have impacted. It is a fragile existence easily threatened by suffering, longing, and sorrow. So what are we mere mortals to do with our measured set of days? I hope that we do everything with the knowledge that there is more out in the offing. Whether that is the hope of tomorrow or the hope in an eternal future, each of us can look up from the focus of a very painful now, and take comfort in an infinite hope.         

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.