After months of introspective questioning, I’ve come to understand that there are so many things you can’t control. Things that you can’t will into submission. Things you can’t ignore or think about in a certain way because it’s easier to think about it in certain terms. So much of that can make you feel very unlucky because its hard to accept, and even harder to deal with. I’ve been on a personal journey for quite some time to make sense of such things–to reconcile the good and the bad that exists in life.
Most of it makes me think of mortality. The fact that we only get one life, and whatever we do with it, and whatever is done to us, we’ve got to face that. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen.
Two years ago this month my friend Bobby died of cancer. He was only 26. I remember hearing he was in the hospital with back pain. I gave him a book to flip through while he recovered. Two weeks after that he was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma. He died leaving us with the wisdom that his diagnosis wasn’t a death sentence, but the day he was given a second chance at life. A life without the burden of fear.
My grandfather is slowly dying (or better, dying more quickly than any of us). One of his legs had to be removed, his lungs are deteriorating, and he’s lost part of his brain functionality. He can’t fish or surf; two things he loved most in his life. Yet, he fights. He fights every day to stay alive.
My Aunt Stella had a stroke that’s left her unable to speak more than a sentence before having to use her respirator. She tires easily and her words are hard to understand, but there’s a glimmer in her blue eyes that hasn’t gone away.
I’m not exactly sure why those stories are relevent, but they seem to speak to me at moments like these.
I’m so reluctant to tell my own tales of deep sadness, to share my own embarrassment and pain with the world, but the more time I dig within myself, the more I refine and face my flaws, the more I wonder about luck. I’ve paid alot for my faults and only have a deeper understanding of self to show for it (maybe most people will say that’s a profound reward and the only one I should really care about). My apologies haven’t always been accepted and that means the life I was building, the life I wanted, won’t happen the way I want. With all this talk about self discovery and redemption, I wonder if it’s possible to miss our chance for good if we’ve done a little bad. If we make a mistake, can we miss our fate? For some things, are there really no second chances?
