I was away at a training last weekend, and on Tuesday evening, taking the bus to the airport from the conference center, I began checking back in to the regular world. Nate Silver's election results were up on my iPhone, showing me that the unthinkable was happening. As I sat with what that might mean, the woman across the aisle from me received a phone call. I wasn't trying to eavesdrop, but she was only 3 feet away.

"Aneurysm." I heard her say in a not-quite-normal voice. It was the not-quite-normal that caught my attention. Then a few more muffled words. A quiet sniffle. I tried to keep my attention on Nate Silver. I tried not to notice how a total stranger was quietly unraveling, 3 feet away from me. I looked in my purse for kleenex, but found nothing to offer her. So I tried not to notice her sniffles, and I gave her what I could: space to be alone on a transit bus through a major metropolitan city.

Another phone call. This time, just sobs. Big, body-shaking sobs. Bus-quieting sobs. Election-news-silencing sobs. Earth. Shattering. Sobs.

As I come back to a world that feels different from before, to a world that's more hostile to the vulnerable and wildly uncertain, I seek the healing balm of gratitude. My usual medicine--compassion--is a little slippery for me right now, but gratitude I can find. If nothing else, gratitude that the news I received Tuesday night was not the news of someone I loved dying from an aneurysm.

I ask the gods to bless that woman on the bus, and I thank them for the perspective my proximity to her conversation offered me. For now, for today, my family is healthy and whole. The world feels upside-down and torn apart, and for that I grieve. For this woman who had to learn about her loved one's aneurysm on a bus to the airport, I grieve.

And I hold on fiercely to the gratitude I can find. Because the truth is, it would be so easy to slip into hate right now. But I am committed to finding love in the world. Or if I have to, creating it where it doesn't exist. We cannot heal with hate. So I start with gratitude. Compassion will come; it always does, and with it--healing. But I'll start where I am. With this tenuous sliver of gratitude that the people I love: my family, friends, all of you, my cat cat, are whole.

That's enough. It has to be.

With love,

~K