Better

Day 80. Better.

The holidays bring on new emotions for us. Not always good one, sometimes we stress over family issues that are practically unavoidable now. Old wounds never healed, we struggle through the gatherings, trying to keep the peace. Some of my childhood holidays sound like fiction when I think about them now, but they were part of making me who I am today. For better or worse.

No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it. Richard Bach:: One.

We should have fond memories of family gatherings. Good food, laughter, the exchanging of gifts. But not all of us are so lucky to have those things, at least not consistently. I can remember more than one year actually coming to blows in the heat of an argument, and my psychotic parent screeching and crying at pretty much all the others. Talk about drama, we had it. Oddly enough, we'd go right back to eating our traditional meal, like nothing had happened. We were pretty good at moving past it, but we never really dealt with it.

I blocked a lot of it out of my consciousness as I got older. I realized other families didn't act that way, so I put all those bad things away, into a box inside my head. The box never got full, because I kept giving it more space.The capacity to live with things was never reached, I just filed them away. I thought I had a solution. When I was 19, my dying great-Grandmother told me the only she wanted was for me to be happy. I really didn't realize how far I had climbed until that day, and how far I still had to go. Here I thought I was halfway up the mountain, and she saw me as just breaking the surface of the ocean.

We all delude ourselves. We are convinced we are happy, successful, smart. We just know that our life is good, we're on the right path, WE GOT THIS. Then, at a time when we least expect it, BOOM. Something happens to plant our feet back on the ground. An illness, job loss, death of a loved one. One event, and we're shattered back to reality.  But because we have faith, we have what it takes to start again. A single step, on the climb of our lives. We just have to imagine it.

Lesson Eighty: Do you think your life can recover from setbacks? Have you started over, more than once maybe, and found happiness again? Think about how you see your dreams: right there, just out of arms reach, and realize that YOU have to power to overcome anything, and have that better life.

650 to go...