There's bad and then there's...

A friend emailed me a link with the title, If you ever think about giving up. I checked out the link and was amazed and touched, but nothing touched me so much as watching the end of the video. Go watch and then come back.

What do you think?

Makes me feel like my problems, as insurmountable and awful as they are to me at the time, are trivial in comparison, but it's not about comparison. It's the old line about being given lemons and making lemonade -- although I prefer to make hummus or avgolemono. I like to mix things up.

The way I believe, each of us choose the lessons we want to learn in this incarnation (life) and he chose to make lemonade. Once upon a less enlightened time, I couldn't understand why me. Why did everything happen to me? To be sure, a lot has happened to me during my lifetime, but nothing I haven't been able to overcome after a brief period of questions, whining and bone shaking fear. I need those moments to utter and complete breakdown before I gird my loins and leap back into the fray, and sometimes the moments happen after I've been through the fire and have a moment to stop and think, What did I just do? before the panicked realization sinks in that I could have been seriously injured or dead. And yet, like Timex...

I have not become so enlightened that adversity makes me say, "Yay, another chance to grow and overcome adversity!" I've paid my dues -- most of them, anyway -- and I'm entitled to some time off before the next round of interesting times comes around, and they will come around. I've no doubt of that. One thing I don't do any more is go looking for trouble. There is no sense looking for something that will find me no matter what I do or where I hide. Instead, I enjoy what I have right this moment and the next moment and the next and thank whatever powers in the Universe guides my fate and watches over me every time I get stupid that I am allowed to continue living and working and writing and enjoying another moment of life.

That doesn't mean I don't plan for the future, but I know without a doubt that the future is not guaranteed to come, that I only have this moment. Whatever forces shaped the me I am right now weren't gentle, but they were necessary to create me at this moment. As a friend recently reminded me, there is no going back and there is no sense dwelling on what could've been. I've mourned the lost chances and absent friends, but one thing I do know is that if something is meant to happen and I've missed the chance, the Universe will bring it back around again and give me a swift kick in the hindquarters to move me in the right direction. Until that happens -- and it has happened -- I am thankful for this beautiful sunny morning with the Colorado blue sky above and a glittering expanse of fiery sun struck diamonds on mounds of fluffy white outside the windows while I am safe and warm inside my comfortable cottage sipping green tea with rose hips and writing on my laptop.