Because You Never Know

Let me start this by saying that things are fine now.

But there have a couple times over the past few days when it looked like they might not be. I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail, but Friday my dad developed some complications with his surgery, and I thought we might lose him. Friday was the scariest day of my life. He’s still in the hospital in the city, but just while they get his medicines right, and everything is going to be okay.

I just know that if certain things wouldn’t have went exactly the way they did, my life would be very different than it is now. Its a scary fucking thought, but I also feel very very lucky.

Here is what I’m taking from it: you never know. You never know what happens next. There is no such thing as true safety and life can change at any second. I’ve always felt this way but never as much as I do now. I think deep down we all know this. So much of our lives are built around the way we react to this basic truth. We try to control it by making things safer, sometimes it is actually helpful like seat belts, and sometimes it is just grasping at sand. Part of our drive for religion is to make sense, to give the events of our lives a sense. I’m not saying it is wrong. I’ve prayed in my own way in more ways than I can explain, and even if there is no higher power to hear or care about my pleas, I received some comfort for making those pleas, and it served it purpose.

The simple truth is you never know.

I’ve been feeling a little lost lately, like I should give up on trying to write and make a difference, but I can’t. Life is uncertain. It is scary and wonderful and insane. We have to find our way to deal with it. I realized that I  developed my coping mechanism a few years ago. Anything can happen, so grab onto everything you can. I want to love as much as I can. I want dream as hard as my soul can dream. I want to laugh at every chance I get, and I want to try and recognize all of the wonderful things in my life as much as life will let me.

Things can be fleeting, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Things might change, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t appreciate them as they are here with us. I decided when I first started dating the Viking that I was going to be as passionate and intense and strange and emotional as I truly am instead of trying to mute myself. I wanted to love on my own terms, and even if things went bad with him, at least I had tried. He has always proven me right. I think that is the example of how I try to live my life. You have to grab hold and give it everything you can even if it scares the fuck out of you, because you will miss the wonderful and you won’t be any safer because of it. You will only be poorer because you let fear keep you from potentially incredible things.

Trying to be happy is a choice. It can be a hard choice, and no one can always be happy, but we have to decide to work for happiness. We have to find the things that make us happy. For me,  happiness is grabbing on to the love and wonderful in my life with both fists and feeling them. Happiness is finding the small (or large things) in the crap and polishing them and putting them on a shelf to look at when the crap is too deep.

My dad is going to be okay. I am blessed with a wonderful sister that has worked her ass off to build an incredible family and will do anything to help us. Tina is open and giving with her heart and everything she owns, including her shower and her bed. For the first time in my life, I have a mate I can call when everything is bad and I have spent the entire day in turbo take-care-of-shit mode and he will come and let me cry on him. Those are my blessing. Those are the things I’m going to grab on to. It far out ways being dressed badly and smelling weird.

Do me a favor and grab on to something today and really love and appreciate it without fear or barriers. You never know.