Over one half-century buzzed by while I barely noticed its passing. In that time I learned that not everything I thought necessary in life was necessary. It was a great, but hard lesson to learn.
From the time I was a tiny child I felt a huge responsibility to fix life. My life was a shambles as far back as I can remember. Perhaps that's why the major part of my attention focused on fixing things around me. I wasted a lot of time, a lot of money, and squandered a lot of energy. Rarely did I ever feel the way I do now.
Contented. Satisfied. Resolved. That's not to say I never feel discontentment or dissatisfaction. Nor does it mean I never find myself in a dither over the mundane, the minutiae and the impossible. However, life has settled down like the bottom of a country pond following a Spring storm.
Throughout my 64 plus years, I've seen dreams fade and watched plans explode in my face. For many folks these things might create a mountain too high to climb, a river too wide to cross. There are places I no longer long to see, and things I no longer yearn to do. The past really cannot be undone. The present really is all I have. Tomorrow is merely an illusion...in fact, so is the next hour. If I allow myself to dwell on what ifs, what may happen, or what hasn't, then I lose the gift of the moment, the joy of the present, and the blessing that becomes the memory to savor in days of emptiness, and trivial inconveniences.
The truth is, disappointment can only rob us of happiness if we allow it. We choose to live in the soil of our own thoughts, emotions and resignations. We choose to feed those thoughts or weed them-- dining on the positive, spitting out the negative. Life really isn't all about me. Life, by its very definition, includes the world around me. It can shape me, or I can shape it. Ultimately, it is what it is-- a mixture of both shaping and being shaped.
So many things need doing in life. Sometimes it seems overwhelming. It's in those times I find I must step back and recognize that not everything needs my input, my imprint, or my energy. Not everyone needs my opinion. In fact, most things can be accomplished by others, and if not, then sometimes they simply do not need to be done at all. Regret does nothing to change yesterday, nor anything to impact tomorrow. To seize the day, we must first seize the moment; to do that, we must take every thought into captivity and let it be the fuel to power us forward--not backwards. Otherwise we simply sit still in the midst of our self-made sinkholes.
