I have started diaries, journals, and blogs, but always seem to stop going there. I know I have probably thrown the diaries and journals away; you do that when you move as many times as I have. And I can’t even tell you where my blogs are… I used to have them on yahoo, when it tried it’s little social experiment known as 360, but they shut that down, and then I angered the yahoo gods and somehow (unbeknownst to me) violated their terms and services and ended up losing that account, so I don’t even have access to them when I emailed them to myself. It’s what I get for not downloading them. There were a few that I really would have liked to have kept. Oh well, it’s a new beginning.
New beginnings are scary, I have done them enough in my soon to be 49 years… Sometimes they were by choice, sometimes they were necessity. Sometimes they were good steps, sometimes they were painful steps. But they all taught me lessons, and looking back they still teach me, I am still learning from them even now.
So here I am off on a new beginning. I lost my job a year ago… a little bit of my fault, a little bit of office politics. It took me a while to let go of things from that job, I didn’t like a lot of things about it, but I did like the people I worked with, and the people I helped on a daily basis. They are the ones that suffered, they are the ones that didn’t have a choice in the whole matter. I was damn good at what I did with them, I just didn’t fit in. I figured to have recovered and be back at work by now, but the universe hasn’t been ready for me to enter the workforce yet. It’s a little scary, aw hell it’s A LOT scary, but with this economy, there is some solace in knowing I am not alone. It doesn’t make it feel great, but it makes it feel tolerable. I have been on this ride before, I have survived this ride before and while I may screaming at the drops, I will relish the rises.
If you are reading this, I hope you will come along for the ride, because life is a roller coaster, with out the twists, and drops, the rises and the straightaways how would we know the good from the bad. I hope I can help, educate, empathize, support, touch your heart and soul.
I will end with one of my favorite quotes, it’s one I thought of often when working with the populations I have over the last 5 years when asked how I defined success with them… It wasn’t giant steps or changes that they made, it was the small moments that I looked for.
“To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
