Grace

Grace is the greatest word ever invented. I learned the word, likely in my Catholic days, but like everything religion, I was just praying to god that we could skip the 2nd and 4th verses and just get home to watch football. Some families say it before dinner too, but I never really thought about what it means. It's like the word sudden, everyone says it, and everyone is fucking convinced that you cannot talk about part of a sudden, but no one really knows what sudden means. I currently have grace metaphorically wrapped around my left wrist in the form of a silver metal bracelet that my sister gave to me when I was in high school. The bracelet is a constant reminder that I've come a long way. I used to never take it off and then hubris said it's OK not to wear it and not wearing it led to sameness and catastrophe. I don't think I'll ever take it off now. People say don't be superstitious and/or believe in the small things that seem to point to fate -- and then you don't wear your lucky socks and then your sports team loses the big game and then you know it -- it was your fault! I'm going to wear my bracelet and my lucky socks!
Grace is hard, grace is like all the hard words: love, hate, anger, elation, betrayal, guilt, they're all easy when you are smoking your cigar, rejoicing on your front porch, drinking espresso and reviewing your brokerage accounts gains from the last decade. So easy to talk about those words when you are removed from them. There should be a law that you are not allowed to expound about grace unless you've been flattened and are in the middle of something where giving grace is the very last fucking thing you'd ever want to do. Someone said that "life sucks and then you die" but it's really "life's tough and then you die." I'm so utterly fascinated and challenged by grace because in some sense you can only learn grace by suffering and empathy and who really signs up for those things anymore? I also have no idea if I can even succeed. (I know I write cryptically, just protecting the innocent, but, god, tonight, I would so ❤️to name all the names). And, not once, but twice in my life I traded a million+ dollars for wisdom, so there's that and that's painful (and who does that?) and I don't even know if I can survive that. But, with grace, it's starts with yourself and you can inwardly examine and love and hurt and cry and then when you survive that, then you can direct it outward, and you're gonna get hurt, likely not permanently, but it will happen -- and, if you transcend, then you will know what it really means to give grace.