WHEN LIFE KNOCKS YOU DOWN_IWSG post

The lab results that shook you to the core.  

The harsh retort that cost you a relationship.  

The needed car repair that costs more than you have.

Life has a way of continually knocking you to the ground without warning.  

Sometimes you don't know if you have it within you to get up one more time.

You don't have to continually get up.  

You just have to get up one more time 

than they knock you down.

And that means adapting to the present, thinking outside of our usual responses to stress.

We have been brought low by the myth of HAPPILY EVER AFTER.  

There is no such thing.

Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. 

There is beauty, laughter, and friendship along our journey, 

but if we focus on the maybe happiness of a future with goal won, we will lose today ...

 We will have lost priceless treasures existing in our Now by the searching for Tomorrow's  fool's gold. 

Jeremy Hawkins wrote in comment to my last post:

"I have been trying to obtain a dream or reality for some time now and for me... 

I have hit the bottom. 

Many life situation has sucked my creative side dry and my steps, sites and attention proves it. 

Do we get it back, can I... I only hope too.

 Sadly, it's a long road... dreams are for those who like me, trying and failing.

Though I keep trying, but there is nothing I am trying for at the moment... 

and that thing called reality, that just sucks.

I think I went off topic... dammit, sorry."

Jeremy, you, nor any of my friends, are ever off-topic with me when you speak from your heart.

The hidden thing about crossroads 

is that we never know we are at one until we have made our decision and are reaping the consequences.

Sometimes the way ahead is not clear.

Yet "Impossible" just gives birth to legends. 

When I was abandoned at six on Skid Row in Detroit, 

when my home burned to the ground with no insurance, 

when the love of my life died in surgery, 

when my whole city was forcibly evacuated from our homes --

 I hit bottom all those times.

Bottom gives us a place to stand, to rise, to reflect upon what is left ... 

to perhaps see a new path to old goals or hidden roads to new ones.

Wilde wrote that insanity was trying the same things repeatedly and expecting different results. 

We must take different steps to reach new destinations.

Each blow, each wound, each set-back has a lesson for us if we but stand back and reflect. 

Those things have shaped us and surviving them has made us stronger, wiser.

There is beauty, there is humor, there is hope ... 

perhaps those are the only lights in Man's dark world. 

In tragedy and in despair, 

when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization that the companion of night is not another night, 

that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, 

and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.

That is the great thing about life: 

  

Though it is often cruel, it is also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise; sometimes the surprises are so amazing that they qualify as miracles,  

and by witnessing those miracles, a shattered person can sometimes discover a reason to live.

Often I am scared down to the marrow of my bones, 

but I keep telling myself that as long as I have laughter, I am not without hope.

In your blog, Jeremy, you always find something to laugh about.  

May laughter be your companion today, leading you to a new goal or the realization of an old one.