I play the Stop. Rewind. Replay. Rewind. game a lot in my life. Always have. I will hone in on something and become obsessed with a particular moment or time that brings me into something that is long ago, far from me, buried in the mist behind me. I'll focus on people that aren't here with me anymore, and the times I miss with them. I'll focus on the shittiness of them being missing. I'll focus then on all of the other unfair shitty things that happen all the time. But seldom do I rewind to the beginning of the mist.
I think that's a thing that helps. Dwelling on things that bring me me back to places that don't feel very good, leaves me often pretty angry and detached from the things I should be celebrating. It puts a focus on whatever cloud I'm standing under in that moment. It makes me only think of the clouds. But if you sit and look at your life in whole, and take yourself all the way back as if you were watching it on a screen, you may see the contrast of black and white.
I often tell people little stories about me as a teenager, and a lot of people have the same observation: I have come a long way and it is a wonder I am alive and doing normal-ish things. So I sit and take myself back to places that weren't very happy for me to be in. Times that were very tough to deal with. Things a child shouldn't have to deal with. I look at myself as that angry teenager with no concept of a future, wearing a "Fuck the world" pendant, sitting in a jail cell for the fifth time before I even turned 19, and I no longer recognize the world I was living in then. I no longer recognize the broken mess I was. I'm now a different broken mess, but a better one.
I retrieve memories of my wedding day, the birth and infancy of my children, the work I put in to make a home for us, and the fire that burned inside me to be what I know is really in me to be. I look at these things and a question nags my mind. What made the difference? What was the turning point? Then I remember the bigger picture. It was God. I could never have turned it around. I wanted to die and when I wanted to die, He gave me a life.
This is a reminder to live it.
Photo credit to: u/V_forvalentin from Reddit
Sing.
Migrate.
Thanks for reading...Z
