Day 37 ❦ Giving can lift the blahness

Day 37 ❦ Giving can lift the blahness

The Gift: A cash donation to the Humane Society

After so many philosophical gifts over the past few weeks, today I  “cashed out”. It was so sad to see my friends leave to go back home to Baltimore, there is a lull in the summer action (or at least there was today...little did I know what Mother Nature had in store for Austin in a few days...and all of the giving opportunities that awaited) and I was mired in a state of blahness. Now, I know that is not a word and I am also aware that throughout this journal, I have made up several words...or at least I have had to add a bunch of words to my computer’s vast vocabulary, but the word blahness as in “being in a state of” just fits for today.

Going to the grocery store, which is usually one of my favorite activities, feels grey, the drive home is uneventful and the house is so quiet...I am surrounded by blahness. When I play Scrabble with my sister-in-law, when we make up a word it stays on the board if we can use the word in a sentence and then describe what the word means...therefore, under those rules, I now declare “blahness” a word which in the worst case scenario in Scrabble will net me 13 points. I am surrounded by blahness and really struggling to even think about giving...but here I am persevering in this exercise of giving every day.

So imagine my delight when a knock at the door reveals a few neighborhood children soliciting pledges for a walk this weekend for the Humane Society...yeah! Instead of pledging, I give them an outright cash gift (because a pledge wouldn’t count until the gift had actually left my hands) and the blahness lifted. Just like that - it felt like magic - I gave and the blahness lifted!

❦ Giving can lift the blahness.

Authors note: Since I officially used my new word blahness 8 times in this post I was able to declare it a word and successfully used it during a recent Scrabble game for 54 points.