I Won't Stay Down

Today I received unexpected and unfortunate news. While I am not really in a place to discuss it publicly, I wanted to share some initial reactions and part of my thought process about it.

There are no guarantees in life. This we know. You can work hard and still finish last. That seems to be a recurring theme for me personally. I get it. Really, I get it already.

I keep reminding myself to stop thinking that just because I try hard that I “deserve” something. But how do you really know when you deserve something? How do we really know that we don’t deserve worse than we have it? So I still try to maintain the thought that I am probably getting better than I deserve despite not getting what I want.

To move forward and out of the self-pity (I can only handle that feeling for about 3 seconds), I keep telling myself that my job is not to move mountains…I’ll save that for Someone else. My job, as mundane as it sounds is just to push. Push. Push. Push. I don’t get to control when, where or how far the mountain moves, I only get to control how hard I push. That’s it. That's my job.

I can choose every day to push or not to push. Succeed or fail. And if at the end of the day I have failed, I go to bed and wake up to another chance to do it all over again and hopefully get it right.

Reality, for me anyway, is that all my pushing will amount only to what life decides to hand me. Nothing more, nothing less. But if I don’t push, life hands me nothing at all. If I don’t push, I fail.

Today a mountain moved and it feels like it moved backward. I pushed and life pushed back, set me in my place and said “now whatcha gonna do?”

I probably should be crying right now. Angry at life. Upset that my hard work didn’t deserve failure.

But I’ve been here all too often. All too often to know that self-pity get’s me nowhere. And for some reason, the moment I got the bad news, I felt a sense of peace about it. Not because I want to accept it or pretend that I am stronger than I am, but because I know from experience that everything involved in this process is good. Strangely, for me, good comes from the processing of bad news. Yeah, I know that doesn’t sound fun. But it’s okay and I’m okay. In fact, I’m probably doing better than I deserve.

Today life knocked me down but I am reminded of the abundance of blessings in my life. Blessings too numerous to let this stop me.

I sincerely hope that you are all having a great holiday. I am thinking of each and every one of you and how much you have blessed my life this year.

Well, I better get back to pushing...