The paths that I have travelled have constantly taken me to places and stages in my life where I have learned that there is no good without bad and no light without darkness....

Hard Times

Each and every day is an unknown and sometimes she was in awe that she woke up and got out of bed so casually, when absolutely anything could happen. She had no guarantees that all would be well, that anything she expected to happen would happen, or that everything she hoped to avoid would not happen. Life was a definite risk - but each morning she headed into the world with anticipation, wondering what paths she would travel that day on her life journey.

Some days started out iffy, but then they turned out so well by the day's end. Other days - well, let's just say she seemed to wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and she went along for the ride even when she did not particularly want to. Throughout her journey she had had some of each and many with a bit of both, but she had learned one thing along the way and that was that she would get through them.

The good days pass, and so do the bad days. She can look back to days where she was on top of the world physically and emotionally, and really feeling grateful to be alive. Then she can look back to other days, when it was literally a matter of gritting her teeth, breathing through her fear, exhaling out her anger at the injustice of it all, and opening again and again to the waves of grief and pain pouring up and through her. But on those days too, she had survived.

However, she felt that she had spent much more time than she should have looking for a better way to survive the hard times. Some hard days were spent fruitlessly pushing down or ignoring the challenging or painful feelings, telling herself that they weren't nearly as challenging or painful as they felt. Other days she spent making emergency runs to the hospital, visits to the doctor and labs for more tests, or attending appointments at the therapist  hoping that a quick tune-up would put her back together again, like new, by day's end. Still other days she spent zoned out, in a daze from ingestion of anything and everything with the word 'calming' written on it!

These days, she spends her hard times awake and aware. She has discovered that this approach is neither easier nor harder than other methods, but, for her,  it is both more honest and courageous and she wants more of each of those qualities in her life. She has also realized that she gets the most opportunity to learn when she ceases from pretending that the hard time she doesn't want to be happening isn't happening. It is happening.  It is part of her life, just like the good times, and she has learned to accept both the good and the bad, and that there is always a light at the end of the dark tunnel .