Life is a funny thing. I’m a scheduler. I like everything planned and organized and neatly folded into packets for easy consumption. Things never work out quite as I planned though, there is always someone throwing a monkey wrench into the whole process and then watching me flail as I try to grab hold of something to keep me firmly rooted in reality.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I think I actually started trying to wrap my head around the fluidness of life last year when I had to go through my biopsy. All of my carefully laid plans had wholly unraveled, and I was grasping at the threads of the tapestry I had woven, trying desperately to put it all back together. It didn’t happen. And for that I am ever grateful, but not for the reasons you may think.

I spent the next several months trying like hell to get those threads back in place, but they had simply come too undone. So I let go. Sort of. I held little bits and pieces close to me, put them in my pocket and tried to figure out how I could one day weave that same image again. One morning, I woke up and looked about me. I saw tiny threads everywhere. Things held on to for so long, out of the belief that one day I could possibly recapture those moments, those dreams, and make them a reality.

Threads from childhood, threads from relationships broken, threads from friendships lost. Scattered about my present like some sort of sewing circle run amuck. Cluttering up my life, cluttering up my spirit. It is hard to say when it happened, or even how it happened, but I swept them all up and threw them away.

While I like to plan things out, I’m not so good at planning my own life. I tend to gravitate towards the unobtainable, in some strange quest to prove to myself that the things I want are simply too far out of reach. Why? Life is short, way too short, and maybe shorter than I think. Why reach for things you can’t have? Why plan for things that won’t work? Why deprive yourself of the things that are good just to hold on to the things that are bad?

So don’t.

I have lost a lot, cried a lot, been hurt a lot. I have kicked and screamed my way through life, not wanting to see what it was that I was supposed to see. Not wanting to believe that anything could ever be what I wanted, could be good.

Life isn’t supposed to be that hard.

There is a lesson and a blessing in every event in my life. Things happened for reasons that at the time I could not comprehend. But now I understand, it all makes some sort of weird sense in my life.

I’m going to get hurt again, we all are. Someone we love is going to let us down. Someone we care about will be lost to us. Something will get in the way of our goals. Something bad will happen.

And someone is going to love us more than we could ever love ourselves. Someone new will enter our life and bring joy to it. We will overcome an obstacle and move forward one more step. Something good is going to happen.

I don’t have carefully laid plans today, I have a general idea of where I want to go, but I’ve tossed out the road map and am just staring at the highway. I am going to love as if I have never been hurt, open my heart and mind to all that is out there to see, and laugh at every little thing that I find funny. Because at the end of the journey, the only thing I want to be quoted as saying is, “Damn, that was one hell of a ride!”

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 11:42 am and is filed under Navel Gazing and Random Rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.