I awoke thinking about enduring. 

So many of the slights and injuries I suffer are minor.  But the human partition of me forgets how swiftly my sky darkens and clears, and that the darkening has little impact on my life and my ability to enjoy it.  Mediations and affirmations help me adjust after I go through the stages of realizing, hey, there's been a setback, and your hopes for that project, day, or venture are dashed.  These crashes are as permanent as waves crashing on a beach.  They crash and recede, and form again.  I need to remember to endure them.

I need to remember not to let them decide who I am and what I can do.  

Others endure worse. Have you seen the new Shriners' Children Hospital ads?  One features a young man who lost a leg in a lawn mower accident as a young child.  Thanks to prosthetics, therapy and the will to endure - and the Shriners - he's the high school football team's starting center.

And what of Savuita Halappanavar and the pain and suffering endured as she suffered a miscarriage and died of septic blood poisoning as her organs shut down?  Her husband endures life after his wife and unborn child's death.

What of the people enduring wars, torture, corruption and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Palestinians and Israelis enduring attack and counter attack? Let me remind myself of the people who endured tsunamis and earthquakes in Japan, hurricanes in America, and earthquakes, monsoons, cyclones, mudslides and volcanos around the world.  Remember the homeless enduring the freezing weather.  Remember David Michael Grubbs, murdered as he worked home from work one dusk, one of the fourteen thousand plus murders in the United States in the past twelve months.  Remember what these victims endured and the loss and grief their family and friends endure.   Think about the starving, dying children around the world, and the brutalized, suffering animals, and the conditions, pain and despair they endure.  Think of those protesting and standing vigil around the world, and what they endure for their principles.

So I reflect on my small slights and whisper, endure, and give thanks that the things I must endure are so petty. The worse that I must endure is my narcissitic, self-pitying self.  

And even that, I can endure.