Gratitude Practice 2020 Day 50: The Next Right Thing Podcast
Way before Frozen II made the phrase "The Next Right Thing" ubitiquis to anyone raising small children, author Emily P. Freeman identified this inspiring phrase as her creative muse and I just can't get enough. Tonight, I'm grateful for "The Next Right Thing" podcast and for the wise yet very digestible insights shared through her writing and words. She is brave and bold and kind and reflective and insightful and I'm so grateful I stumbled upon this gem.
Episode 101: "Read Your Own Headlines" is a terrific place to start and explores a simple concept I continue to ponder. What would the headlines of my life, my daily grind, my daily comings and goings say? How would they read and look splashed on the page? What would be surprising? Salacious? Sacred? Where is meaning found within the mundane? What should be or could be recorded to mark time and development and growth? What would be notable and what would be total nonsense? In her podcast she shares: "This inner world needs our attention, but it won’t shout to compete with the pace of the world. Usually it only whispers. It doesn’t respond to programs, agendas, or to hustle. To hear the headlines of the soul, we have to take a little time on purpose to consider what’s going on in the invisible places within us.
When we ignore the headlines of our lives, how can we possibly understand the full story our life is telling? Frederick Buechner in his book Whistling in the Dark says this:
"There’s also of course, the news that rarely if ever, gets into the media at all, and that is the news of each particular one of us. That is the news we’re so busy making that we seldom get around to sitting down and thinking it over. If it takes some extraordinary turn, we might. But the unextraordinary commonplace events of each day as they come along, we tend to let slip by almost unnoticed. That is, to put it mildly, a pity. What we’re letting slip by unnoticed are the only lives on this planet we’re presumably ever going to get.”