Weekend Journaling Prompt

On our resources

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Hello,

There is a beautiful word in the Hebrew Bible: selah. Found most often in the psalms, it is an invitation to pause at the end of what you’ve read. Selah: don’t hurry on. Rest a while and absorb the meaning of the words.

Selah feels so necessary right now. We need to pause to understand what is happening. We need to make space to take in difficult truths, and we need to make room for the beauty that still exists. I believe this is a political mission now: to be clear-eyed; to see the world as it is; to feel the feelings we need to feel. 

Selah. We have seen the alternative: the baying mob, the spite, the lust for revenge. The clinging to any idea that justifies our rage, no matter how untruthful. The urge to cast our own dysregulation - our own suffering - onto someone else’s form. We can do better than that. We can hold the fragility of our pain rather than throwing it around. We can regroup and make new plans. 

Selah is a resource, although not in the way we usually think about resourcing. It has nothing to do with the contents of our bank accounts, our networks, our assets. It is instead something that we can draw on when we need to; or, better still, something that we can turn into a habit that becomes protective of our sanity, part of our steady functioning. 

Not all resources are free, of course. A lot of us have to live without the full resources we need. But sometimes, also, we fail to allow ourselves the resources that are available because we don’t see them as a priority. Now is the moment to change that. There is a lot of work ahead, a lot of difficult emotions to process. We will need to be well-resourced to cope.

Selah. Breathe. 

This week’s journaling prompt invites you to understand what it means to be well-resourced.