I sometimes bookmark things that I know I’m going to love and save them to read when I can fully concentrate.  Which is why I only read this essay about miscarriage in Catapult months after it was posted.  It’s a hard read.  I still think you should read it.

It begins with her second loss, back pedaling to frame this second miscarriage through the lens of the first one.  She writes, “How do we begin to hope when hope has wrought crushing disappointment in our lives?”  How do you continue to believe it will happen for you when you’ve received so much evidence to the contrary?  Or, “I thought how unfair it was that that bedspread had outlived our child, and some but not all of my hope died, like depleting power in a video game.”  We have hope until it’s all drained away.  And then it’s game over.

The essay doesn’t have a neat ending.  She is pregnant and the baby is probably here by now, though there is no neat wrap up to her words, no relief that it all worked out.  This is about the actual cost of hope, what it means to hope, why we sometimes protect ourselves from hope.  Like I said, a hard read.  But I still think you should read it.

In honour of the 700th Roundup (really 600th due to misnumbering), I’m asking YOU to comment with a link to a post that has stuck with you.  It can be your post or someone else’s post.  It can be written any time within the last 12 years.  (The first Roundup was on July 21, 2006.)

Leave a link and an explanation for why this post resonated with you, just like the regular Roundup.  Once you leave your post, go and peruse everyone else’s post.

If you’re posting more than one, please put them in individual comments (not bunching them into one comment).  And, yes, the more the merrier so post as many as you wish in separate comments.

This is mine to kick things off:

I’ve thought often about Toddler Planet’s “It’s Not Fair” since she wrote it back in 2011.  And I return to read it again and again as a reminder of how to get through life with grace.  She wrote it about six months before she died from metastatic breast cancer.  These lines may not make sense without reading the longer parable contained in the post, but I think about them all the time: “We each get one life, one daily wage, and that’s it.  The guy next door gets one life to live.  The mom down the street gets one too.  No one ever promised us the same life, the same opportunities, the same blessings, or the same time to live.  No one ever promised that.  We are promised one opportunity, one life, and how we live it is between us and our Creator (I believe).  There is no comparing.”  She did a lot of amazing things while she was on this planet, and I’m eternally grateful for her writing that put the imbalance of the world into perspective gave a frame for considering all moments.  I hope this post changes your life, too.

I cannot wait to see what you guys post.  Give us posts to read to celebrate the weekly Roundup!

There is nothing good about the two week wait.  It’s Schrödinger’s pregnancy; you are and you aren’t, and waiting to know is agony.

I think that interaction with waiting created other negative feelings about waiting that have bled into the rest of my life.  I’m not a big fan of inaction.  I want to do things now.  I want to know answers now.  I tend to address things and take care of things immediately.  I do not like to waste time.

Tiny Buddha had an essay about the power of waiting that begins with this thought, “Waiting has a bad rap in modern Western society.”  We’re more seize the day, “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” sorts of people.

The author states: “I really didn’t know much about waiting. I thought it was something you did if you didn’t have courage or conviction. It was just an excuse not to take action. I know better now … The mind hates uncertainty, and would rather make a mistake than simply live in a state of ‘not knowing’ while the right course unfolds.”

It’s a hard concept to wrap your brain around; waiting instead of doing.  Believing that it’s okay to hold back; that you’ll end up where you want to if you do.  It is the exact opposite of what is ingrained through infertility: Start now.  Continue even if you’re exhausted.  Time is of the essence.

And maybe some of that is true with family building.  Time isn’t your friend.  But holding onto that idea and bringing it into the rest of my life maybe isn’t the best course of action.  This essay gave me a lot of food for thought.

Do you think the two week wait influenced your relationship with waiting?

I love libraries.  I got married in a library.  I walked down the middle aisle between the stacks on either side.

I visit my library regularly.  I go at least once a week to return or grab books, but I also go on bad days when I need to clear my head for a few minutes.  I just like being near books, even if I don’t take any home with me.

So I wholeheartedly love this idea of being a library tourist and visiting libraries around the world.  We like taking the kids to popular libraries — tourist destination libraries — but I also really love going into small, local libraries.  I usually like the small, local libraries more because the librarians talk to you and you get a sense of the area.  This would be your library if you lived there.

Do you visit libraries in places you visit?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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A professor set up his out-of-work message with a caveat.  Any emails sent between the dates he was gone would be deleted by the server.  The sender received a message instructing them to re-send the email again after an assigned date.  In other words, the professor returned to inbox zero, the same way they left for their vacation, and the burden to resend was on the sender.  He reasoned that if it was an important message, the person would resend.  And if they didn’t, he had to accept that fact in order to avoid being buried under email when he returned to work.

I kind of love this and I kind of hate it at the same time.  I think it’s brilliant AND it would depend on the person whether I resent the message.  I would really really really need to get the message through to play along.

What would you do?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.