On Faith, Gratitude & Inner Strength
Hello and welcome back to my blog!
It's been more than a couple of months since my last post which is quite a long time, especially for a budding blogger like me. The reason behind this is a bit more personal for me to share in detail to the internet, but I assure you it was both an unexpected yet necessary break from, well, everything in my life. But now, I am proud to say that my life has normalized again, and I have been itching to come back to my baby (AKA this blog!) I also didn't want to just dive right in with more travel posts like nothing happened (don't worry, more are coming soon!), so I decided to dedicate this post to share about some significant lessons I've come to realize these past two months.
First of all, just to provide you a bit of context, this unplanned break was brought about by a truly life-changing event that was extremely difficult, fast-paced, and immensely complicated all at the same time. There were really moments where I didn't even know how to react anymore as everything was just happening so quickly. After this event, I spent the past two months slowly picking up where I left off — updating this blog is the one of the last pieces!
New York City, USA
Now, in all of my adult life, I've always been trying to make things work for the best -- doing anything and everything I could do to make things work the way I would want them to. Of course, things don't always turn out as I planned but at least efforts were made to further my cause. It was in this incident two months ago that, for the first time, I felt completely helpless because I could literally not do anything concrete to help. It was in this incident that I could not control anything that was happening. It was in this incident that all I really could do was have faith.
I realize here that having faith comes hand-in-hand with finding your inner strength. Believing that everything will turn out alright requires you to refuse the temptations of giving up hope. After this ordeal was over, people kept telling me how strong I was to face this head-on. I really didn't know how to reply to this at first since it never occurred to me to see it as strength. I honestly didn't realize that you could give up and just accept the fate that was handed to you -- which would have been a perfectly fine option for me considering the extreme situation I was in. But I was not having that, regardless that this situation was completely out of my hands. This was just another thing I had to overcome, not to succumb to. In the end, there was really no other option than to be strong.
Mount Pulag, Benguet, Philippines
A large aspect of where I gain my strength is one I am eternally grateful for: the care and support of loved ones. It may be so typical and cheesy to say but I genuinely would not be where I am without them. All the tremendous waves of love and encouragement I have been getting these past two months really made me question what I did to deserve all this. I've been a very appreciative person even before all this has happened, so you cannot imagine how gratitude is pouring out of me all the time now.
But I've realized that gratitude doesn't end at just giving thanks. You can always take it one step further: offering your service, providing a listening ear, even just by being as supportive as your loved ones are. Gratitude should be taken not only as a simple greeting, but also as a jump-off point of all sorts of acts of appreciation and kindness to others.
Thanks for taking the time to read this rather intimate post! Let me know what you think in the comments below :)
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