THE ENCOURAGERS LIFE

  As the dog toddled beside me sniffing every scent, smell or gross thing that he could find all I could think about was the feeling I had. I thought about this often on our walks. About how I wasn't where I needed or wanted to be. I thought about all the hills I would have to climb to get there. All the mountains in the way. All the things I didn't know. The skills I don't yet have. And the overwhelm of 'cluelessness,' would come meaning by the time I would return home I would be returning to life feeling like those mountains where higher, those hills were steeper and the skills I would have to learn were impossible for my brain to comprehend. I loathed feeling that way. Because the fact is I am a hard worker. I accomplish in the face of my limitations. I am like a Jack Russell pup who refuses to give up the toy. I am relentless. Yet adorable. But I also get tired. Discouraged. Demotivated. Just like everyone else. We are human. And that is both wonderful and a pai

As I watched the men throwing the rope out to wrap around the deer's antlers I empathised with the deer all too deeply. It was stuck in mire. It was tired. It was scared. It was breathing heavily groaning under the strain of its ordeal. Sweat and muck on its coat. It was in a bad state. The men pulled. I worried for its neck. The pull forced its nose into the muck making the deer catch its laboured breath. The truth was, if the men gave up. It was done for. But the pulling was also dangerous to its mortality. The deer had wandered in. It relied on its successes in the past to be the foundation of its accomplishment with this crossing. It's trapping was its own instinct gone wrong. Now it couldn't move. Bogged down by the mud drying around it. Encasing it. Surrounding it. The deer just wanted to get to the other side. It just wanted to make it. So it went for it. It took a chance. It believed it could make it. It pressed through. It made it three quarters of the way cross be