November 01, 2024 – A

What do you do 
when there is nothing you can do?
Where do you turn
when there is nowhere to turn?
I'm serious.

What holds you up?
What keeps you going?
Were do you find your "Umph"?
Your spirit?
Your determination?
Your will?

What guides your boat
on its path through the sea?

Odysseus said,
"I will endure and I will press on!
And when the heaving sea 
has shaken my raft to pieces,
then I will swim!"

Where does that come from?

We are still here!
Like Odysseus, we have not caved
to our circumstances!
And we will not!

What keeps us going?

I asked that question to Martha Knott
at her bedside in XYZ Nursing home's intensive care ward.
She had fallen the night before getting out of bed,
and a large dark purple bruise covered her left cheek,
closing her eye.
Her left arm was in a sling.
She has just gone through her litany
of thing she could not do:
"I cannot see.
I cannot hear.
I cannot find my way to the toilet.
I cannot read the paper.
I cannot even drink a cup of coffee.
I don't know what is going to happen to me."

To which I had responded,
"Martha! What keeps you going?"

She paused for at least three minutes.
Turned her head and looked at me with her right eye.
Laughed and said, "I don't know. I just go."

We all "just go!"
May it be said of all of us always!
May it be so!