Monday, December 31, 2012

New Year's Eve (alone)

So here I am, alone on New Year's Eve. I worked an eleven-hour shift today and work early tomorrow, so I figured I'd spend New Year's Eve at home with my parents for the first time in years. Now they are asleep and I am alone. Life rarely happens how you hope or expect. I have concluded that the only way to be happy is to accept life as it is. This is not to say we shouldn't strive for what we want, or give up easily, only that our realities are often different than our imagined ideals. And it seems the most painful trait is the inability to accept the limits of our control.

When the exterior does not reflect what we desire inside, when what we feel ought to be reality does not line up with our experience, we despair. This is unfair. This is unjust. This is not how it should be. Can I live in a world where this is the case? Yet often our most true source of control is internal. Our control exists in our perspective. We can find a hundred reasons each day to despair or rejoice. Still we ache for the world to change, rather than for us to adjust how we interpret it. We stay trapped within the same sense of worldly injustice. How ironic is it that, once we let go of our desperate need to control whatever issue concerns us, we find resolution and solace? Relief resides within, not without.

Coming to peace is an internal process.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Inaugural Blog Post

2012 is about to end and we are still here. I am not surprised. Even with all the uncertainty of the day, I can't help but remain enthusiastic. I feel like I am exactly where I am meant to be. Following an idea I picked up from new age books, I often wonder if, before we were born, we scripted every detail of our lives as maps for personal advancement, and that our challenges are critical to reaching our highest potential. Sometimes when we are despairing, the benefits can be so difficult to see. Yet each struggle has changed me; they offered the painful power of perspective.

I guess my pre-life self was ambitious.

I pray that every person facing despair will find moments of solace, will embrace and rejoice in them, and take the small truths they offer. Often these small mental movements hold the answers we crave.