Each closing year, like many of you, I look to hope. Hope the next year will be better, brighter, calmer, and easier. I've felt this way for a long time. In fact, I can remember the year it started. There is so many things for me to be thankful for, but the price for the scattered moments of happiness has been high, and sometimes I get lost in the why.
Yesterday I felt something for the new year that I haven't experienced in years. For a brief moment in the afternoon I was showered with shear joy. It lasted for only a few minutes but it was long enough for me to understand real change would be coming this year. I felt calm, hopeful, and assured. But sometimes the gifts the universe intends to give us can be intercepted and the positive path it sets you on can be washed away.
By the evening everything had shifted. Hope was replaced with a blanket of doubt, sadness, and confusion. Like a heavyweight fighters punch to the gut, the air vacated my lungs as I struggled to hold the pieces together. The new normal had once again set in and I was watching my path crumble under the pressure. Eventually I realized that if there was to be joy, I needed to allow it in. If there was to be calm then I needed to create it, and if my life was to return to the path that the universe showed me earlier in the day, then I had to take control. Change is always exciting, frightening, and perplexing, but standing still never got anyone anywhere.