Just Keep Walking

My little friend Gavin had a major breakdown today. When I arrived to take my shift with his program his parents were both out running errands, which apparently did not settle very well with Gavin...at all. About ten minutes into our day together Gavin just plopped down on the floor and started crying uncontrollably. He doesn't use words and therefore can't tell me what makes him sad, so I was a bit confused about what I could do to stop the crying. As instinct required I immediately picked Gavin up and just held held him while rocking and singing. This actually worked...for about five minutes.

Then he jumped off my lap and lunged across the room to a different chair where he continued to cry and scream. So my aching heart followed him across the room and tried to comfort him again.

This pattern of

breakdown-->
comfort-->
breakdown-->
comfort-->
breakdown

continued for just over an hour.

In many moments of that hour I thought it was the end. I thought, multiple times, that Gavin and I were done.

Finished.

Over.

But now it is a new day and we are still friends.

What's over is the breakdown.

What's over is the feeling that I'm not making a difference in Gavin's life.

After a long period of what felt like totally ineffective soothing of a very distraught little boy, the crying stopped. By the time we had a snack at three Gavin was smiling and laughing as if nothing terrible had ever happened.

Healing.

This seems to be a fairly common theme in life. Things are rollin' along just fine until something triggers inside of us and all of a sudden we feel alone. So we shut down. We scream, cry, drive all through the night...just because we don't know what else to do. And despite the fact that the majority of us can adequately use words, in those moments of breakdown none of the words we know will quite describe what we are feeling. No one can truly fix our problem, whatever it may be at the moment, because we aren't exactly sure what the problem is.

But comfort, love, and healing do come along after the breakdown - as many times as they need to. Right now Gavin is happy. I have not doubt, however, that we will experience another unusually difficult day together. But that day will end. And he will once again find comfort.

I guess what I'm getting at is that it's okay to breakdown now and then as long as we remember that the breakdown isn't the end of the pattern. There is a light at the end of that crazy-dark tunnel we're in, but we have to go through the tunnel to reach it.

So just keep walking friends. Just keep walking.