Sunday, January 4, 2009

Life Turns on a Dime...

Hey everyone. Everyone who reads this anyway. I just found out that a friend of mine lost her husband abruptly to a massive heart attack. This past weekend they were sharing the new year's arrival and now...he's gone. Just like that.

Big sigh here. It just brings me back to what I was thinking about when my Tommy died. The fact that you just never know what you will be faced with at any given time. We all go about our daily business and rarely give a passing thought to the fact of our mortality or the mortality of those we love. We go to work, eat bacon, go shopping, try on shoes, complain about our finances and the cold, and we never really know when our story will be over. We don't know when the proverbial covers will be slammed shut, cutting off our happily ever after. We spend much of our time grousing about how our ever after is not a happily as we would like.

Too bad bub. If you aren't happy in your ever after, who should be held responsible for that? Me? Your cat? Dr. Phil? I don't think so. The person responsible is staring back at you when you look in the mirror to brush your teeth in the morning. I'm not about to tell you that you don't have a right to grouse. How should I know? I don't walk in your shoes every day. Maybe you have a tremendous daily burden. Maybe you have paper skin and glass bones. I don't know. All I am saying is that the only person who can really make a move to bring more happily into your ever after is you. You aren't helpless. You aren't powerless. You may just have to adjust your expectations a bit.

You might want to tell me to stick my happily ever after in my ear. You have the right to feel that way. But will telling me that make you feel happier? If so, here I am my friend, waiting for you to tell me where to put my happily ever after. You can email me, you can put it in the comment section of this blog, whatever works for you. You could even send it U.S. mail if you have my snail mail address. I don't mind. I bruise easily yes, but I will recover.

Will that make you happier? If so, more power to you. If not, then why are you complaining about not being happy? Why not just do whatever you need to do in order to be happy? How important is it to you that you are happy? Are you willing to do what it takes in order to find that happiness? Even if its hard to find your happily ever after?

Why does it seem like it's so hard for you to find happiness when it seems easy for others? Why is life so unbalanced, so unfair? I don't know. It just is. All I know is that you are wasting time stomping your feet about life not being fair and being overly hard for you. Time that could be spent pursuing whatever you need to pursue in order to have your own little piece of happily ever after.

And the clock is ticking. Your clock. Ticking out the moments. Counting out the seconds that you could be using to be happy. To be fulfilled. To work towards something really meaningful. Something of substance. Something that will cause your God to say, "This is my son/daughter in whom I am pleased." Something that will make you stop brushing your teeth for a moment, stare in the mirror, and realize that you did what you needed to do. What you could do. That you should be proud and satisfied.

If that moment came, right now, where your story was over, could you say you did all you could to write your happily ever after?

Five things I am grateful for:

1.) I am not completely powerless over my life
2. ) I am completely powerless over my life (yeah, I know, a paradox)
3.) I am still writing my happily ever after
4.) I can write my happily ever after in pencil
5.) Pencils have erasers

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