It is a road that we travel in life that sometimes is twisted, double backs, up a hill, down a valley, summits a mountain and treads water in the great sea of everything. Clarity has risen out of the burning ashes like a phoenix showing its glory of potential in my often clouded head.
We make choices. Choices are one of those aspects of life that we truly own. We make a choice and be it wrong or right we then have that choice for the rest of our life. There are no 'go backs' and 'do overs'. If we make a choice that later appears to be a mistake all we can do is make another choice that is more educated. Hoping that we can correct the errant choice of past in some measure.
There are those choices that we can never resolve. They break something in a relationship, a part of whom we are, something physical inside of us. They create damage that is insurmountable. There is no summit to this cliff and once we accept that we can shift the focus of our intent to working with what we have.
In the last two years I have seen the results of choices made long ago and felt the repercussions. I have had two strokes. I have a PFO. I have loved and lost. I have watched, tried to learn and determine what I should be doing.
I have been working at it little by little but in doing so have uncovered other things. I have, in slowly stopping the damage of weight gain by turning it into weight loss, blown a gasket, so to say. My gall bladder needs to be removed and in 20 days that will occur. I have incurred great debt with all that I have tried to do correct and medical expenses in the last couple of years. All I can do there is chip away at it a little bit at a time. I have what seems to be insurmountable debt from college (not once but twice) that I know will come down over time.
I do not want to stay where I am for more than a handful of years. I need to work on choices that continue to rehabilitate me into whom I once was, while softening the damages already done. I have a thought, a kernel of hope that I have realized in the last few days and I am setting a goal for that hope. I looked at my belts handing on my closet door today and they hang maybe 4 inches off of the top and end merely three inches off of the ground. In all of them I have had to punch more holes. More and more the pants are beginning to fall off even with the belts sinched around my waist. But I looked at those belts and was horrified that once my waist was that big.
I shed a few tears at my horror. I do not want to be that person any more. I have made choices that have damaged my body too much over the years. I will never be able to undo all of that but I believe that I can rehabilitate what I can out of who I am today into whom I want to be tomorrow, next year. I am done with the old me. I have lost so much that I cannot get back. There are bridges that are so damaged they can never be crossed again.
I have a hope, a dream. I know there are few wants that I have but I know that on the pathways ahead of me I will find opportunities and if I make the correct choices maybe, just maybe, those wants will be fulfilled. Some are personal just for me and make me smile, others are tools that I would like to have so that some smaller dreams can happen.
As I think of this and look at the times ... it is cyclic. It was probably two years ago and maybe a couple of days back I had the first of the strokes. I bottomed out in that process in March and began my first cycle of learn, live and repair. I spent last year learning that I can love again and even though it ended so abruptly and shattered my heart I now know of that reality again. I am facing another medical crisis two years later and resolution will be in March. I am done with that cycle. Choice made.
I have a dream. I have a hope. Now to get there. That is my choice. I am making that choice and somehow ...
no not somehow. It will happen
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