A Year of Gratitude – March 18, 2024
Gratitude found me today in a place I wasn’t looking for it. I can easily admit that my day began in a way that could only be described as disappointing. I was okay with that, it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be overcome. Yet I was having a bit of trouble breaking away from the feeling of being disappointed in what had happened.
To be clear, I know that I have company in that feeling today. Life is full of disappointments both big and small. They’re just part of the landscape.
So imagine my delight at deciding to take a walk in our old downtown area to be greeted by a tiny rainbow, a fraction of a rainbow, just waiting for me to witness it. I know that it was good fortune to happen upon it, to see it on a day that I needed something to pick up my spirits a bit. I saw it and immediately felt the opposite of disappointment.
Instead, I was filled with the warmth of pure serendipity. I’m not often a visitor to this place. I rarely take a break in the middle of the day to visit, although I do enjoy stopping here to see the falls. I have been here hundreds of times and never witnessed a rainbow. Until today.
The building behind the rainbow is one of the old mill buildings in our town. This water runs through downtown. It used to power the textile mills our town was built up around. Some of them predate our old farmhouse. When the milling industry fell apart, they were shuttered and left empty.
Luckily, many of these spaces have been reimagined and repurposed. You’ll find businesses, restaurants, a brewery, and shops in these grand old buildings. And the falls just keep running through. They no longer power grand textile looms, but they are a beautiful reminder of what this place was, is, and has come to be, all while this water just keeps on running.
It really is possible to change, to evolve, to make choices that allow us to become something different than we have been. What a beautiful gift that is, to imagine that we can, like this old building, be useful and purposeful in completely new ways.
Today, the water, and the rainbow made from the mist, reminded me that disappointment can cloud our days, but it can’t keep beauty from forming. While I know that disappointments are a reality, I also know that we can choose how to handle them. I need to work through them, effect change where I can, accept that I can’t control it, and keep walking forward.
Unless I keep moving forward, I’ll miss the beautiful things that are waiting to inspire me, to fill me with that childlike sense of wonder we feel when we discover something beautiful and magical. It would be such a shame to miss the rainbows.
I’ll keep right on walking. I want to be sure that I don’t miss a single one of them.
This post is part of our A Year of Gratitude Series. You can find the introduction, inspiration, and entire year’s gratitude’s posts here.