After the big, overwhelming changes bellow through, you feel the value, weight, and truth of what has arrived. You sense the vibration of the charging locomotive after it blares a horn telling you change has come. Sometimes you’re sitting above the combustion, catching small glimpses of the fiery smoke as your choices propel everyone on the train forward.
Yet, often changes moves in slowly and steadily from bystanders’ viewpoints. They see a line of freight cars rolling in, sturdy, ordered, and rhythmic. This can appear so from above, to the sides, and even below. But inside that moving train, you sometimes look out and see a landscape too quickly vanishing as the last old and worn out cargo gets cut off and left behind.
We sometimes notice the clinging dew as spring moves to the heat of summer. We always feel the breath of fresh air and then ensuing hard choices as fall blows in but then takes away our cover and leaves us bare in the snowstorm. Rarely though do we notice the rigid, harsh winter’s frozen landscape melt slowly to fuel small buds full of hope and life. Yet, while we miss so much and remember too little between seasons, moments, and days, the train keeps moving forward; propelled by our sometimes barely noticeable and sometimes over analyzed choices. The locomotive charges toward what we think is some better, brighter, and more colorful purpose.
So sometimes the weight of that charging locomotive sinks in. We feel it in our bones; our muscles stick to the cab car, tracks, or empty, dirty ground. The pressure builds in our heads and the burden creeps in behind our eyes. Our joints ache. Our limbs wish to lay still as the heaviness of the change glues us down. But that heaviness often isn’t bad. It can be a good weight we learn to carry and use to lay a more honest and straightforward track. And yet, it is still a cargo and one we carry forward so continuously, only sometimes do we stop to truly feel what we are carrying or dropping at each of life’s many stops.
So when we feel that weight, the deep exhaustion in our bones, let us not become overwhelmed, angry, or melancholy. But let us instead see the blessings of the gift in the new weights we now carry forward. Let it remind us to stop, hop off the train more, and to breath in fresh air whenever the charging locomotive has less smoke to inhale. Let us be thankful for the weight which means change has come and we have more to carry and do. We each have a full line of cargo cars to fill with more changes, more memories- more life- as we charge ahead.
Today, I feel the heaviness. I am weighted down to my core. But this weight means I have some much more for which to work, to live, and to be thankful.
–Written by Sandy Heights
Image by <a href=”https://pixabay.com/users/jingoba-24598/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=253134″>Jiří Rotrekl</a> from <a href=”https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=253134″>Pixabay</a>
Thoughts of This 