The wolf in you will see you through long nights,
the squirrel through long winters.
Our life happens in seasons.
It is a story we are writing, every day as it happens, and we get to make it a good story, we get to make it a great story. And great stories are not all easy happy moments, they are defined by the times of adversity and the way in which we face them.
We have this notion, which we later learn, through some surprise and discomfort, that all the heroics and teeth we can flash at our immediate impasses, fail us, when the trial is not one of a brief and noble battle.
The path to psychological adulthood we learn, is not a roar into the night, nor a beating of our chest like a drum, nor a warrior stance. Instead, it is simply the quiet getting on with it, in a far less glamorous reality; a kind of carefulness, a preparation against the long trial of a cold winter, where our friends cannot save us, our responsibilities overwhelm us and even our hard-won accolades and abilities fall short of what the long moment demands of us. It is the squirrel, not the wolf, that we need to honour.
The squirrel is the one concerned with planning for winter, surrounding ourselves with resources and comforts and practices that will carry us through, not the snarling and prowling of the wolf, that serves us in the single battle.
We will all face these times of protracted aloneness, times which feel luckless and ask more of us than we feel we have. It sits on us like a season, and it slowly saps at our stores of cheer and courage.
The invitation is to realise that our life is happening for us not to us.
Be Bigger Than the Moment!
