“Give thanks with a grateful heart”

Best I can do is to give thanks with an overwhelmed, aching heart.

I am pausing today, as best I can, from the responsibilities that have felt so monumental and insurmountable lately.

I was thinking this morning about the message I want to send my grad cohort in our active discord channel. We have a specific channel just for wellness, where we open up about difficulties and encourage one another. And I think what I want to say is this:

I know it feels like the competency we are all feverishly working on right now is the most important thing, THE piece from our grad school program that matters the most.

But it’s not.

While it IS important (and while I AM overwhelmed and anxious about it all), the most important thing I am taking from this program is this:

Look what I did. Look what WE did. We persevered through some of the most challenging, busy times of our lives, juggling so many balls. And when they fell, which they inevitably did, we had each other to pick them up and hand them back to us. I will take a lot away from this program, but my most important thing are the lifelong friends I made along the way.

Relationships. We learn a lot about developing rapport and building relationships with the people we work with in our field. You can’t help people unless you are in relationship with them. It’s the foundational thing.

In life, too. It’s what everything else is built upon. The most important piece of this existence.

The greatest of these is love.