Good Morning ADD Irregulars, WSN Contributors and all my Digital Neighbors @ Padre's! Sundays are for musing, here is something on my mind and shared with you.

There are days when everything coming at you in the news is bad, when issues in your personal life feel burdensome and inescapable, when the weight of sorrow or hardship for friends or family feel impossible to help bear. Those days of tempted surrender to the darkness of life, the seeming futility of things in the current messed up chapter of humanity leave you feeling like cocooning into some state of oblivion fed by your favorite addiction or the new one you are developing. Those days are real and they suck. Sometimes every single step you want to take that might deliver you from this situation is blocked. Solutions seems beyond reach and the mire of the moment is pulling you deeper into the darkness.

There is no sugar coating these types of experiences, but that is not the entirety of the experience. Amid the oppression, the hopelessness, the feeling of futility, there is a thread of gold. It might be only ONE thread, but if you find it, it may well be your lifeline. Believe in that gold thread, and realize that it may have the means of helping you hang on and maybe even lead you to a rough climb out of the current situation. If you don't have the eyes to see the thread; pray, meditate, search logically for whatever you need to open your eyes and awaken your heart just enough to see the shine of that thread can can lead you beyond the moment or grant you a respite from heaviness of the moment. I hope you have a genuinely concerned or find a genuinely concerned person in your life to help you see that thread or at least search for it. If you don't believe in it, you will never find it. If you do, life might surprise you. Yes, yes, you may be chin deep in the crap and the feeling of sinking under is very real, but now you are treading shit, and one day might be escaping it.

My route out of these shit-pools is gratitude. I try to practice it most when life gives me reasons not to find it. I don't deny the circumstances, I find the reason, the thing, person, experience, or hope that allows me to find that thread of golden gratitude and hold on it as if it were going to be the oxygen that saves me from suffocation if I should slip below the shit-pool momentarily. No pollyannish platitudes, just real gratitude for one thing first, and then the possibility there may be more. To know that I can escape the pool and feel clean again. I may never be able to change the circumstances, but I can change me. There is more freedom in that realization that many will ever discover in their of lives ready surrender. You are the exception. Find the thread and make the climb, believe in the oxygen and take a deep breathe, tread today and plan your next one step toward liberation, understanding or clarity. On to gratitude form better minds and hearts than mine. Happy Sunday Digital Neighbors!