We can do hard things–Glennon Doyle Melton

Dearest Wee Girl–

Read this quote again and again and again:

We can do hard things

Commit it to memory.  Repeat it under your breath.  Yell it out loud.  These five words are beyond important.  They are instructions for how to live the life you are born to live.

Let me back up here to a few weeks ago when you, my “potentially would only eat cheese if I could” girl all of a sudden started requesting no cheese, specifically no grated cheese.

“No cheese on my pasta”

“Can we make nachos without cheese?”

At first, I wondered if you were having some kind of hate-on for cheese, which occasionally happens when you eat one food too frequently…but this felt different.  And so I asked why you didn’t want grated cheese, and you replied:

“Because you keep grating your finger”(which is too true- I am nothing if not a distractable multitasking klutz who grates her finger about eight out of every ten times…and I’d been on a roll with injuring at least one finger per grated cheese meal for a while).

And so we talked.  About how when we injure ourselves or take a risk our bodies can always heal again, after.  About how we can’t live our lives without grated cheese simply because I may (okay, will) grate my finger, and look! It’s already healed!

Some injuries take longer to heal from than others.  But we always always heal, in fits and spurts and spirals and cha-cha-chas.  

And in the meantime, I’m using the box grater instead of the micro plane grater because, well…if there are simple things we can do to minimize the smaller injuries, then we can focus on doing the bigger, harder things.