THIS

Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again.  And in between the amazing and the awful its ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful. – LR Knost

The ups and downs of life. We can’t avoid them.  And honestly would we really want to? While there are times when we all wish we could fast forward, would we really want a life with just ups and no downs?  I don’t think so.

This was a rough summer for me.  And I am still healing.  But this hard time, this heartache, it makes me think back to the wonderful memories of when everything was perfect.  I hold onto those memories so tight, knowing this will not last forever.

While packing up for the move I found cards my mother sent me during other rough times.  And those cards felt like a wonderful blanket of love and warmth, with the things she wrote still holding true.

THIS. This is all part of life.  We cannot appreciate to the good without also experiencing the bad.  I remember reading a book called “The Prophet” when I was 19.  Totally changed my life.  One of the passages states only that which brings you great joy can bring you great sorrow. Truth be told, I will gladly grieve the loss to be able to say how much joy I had with my mother.  I will gladly cry and miss her now, for the fact that I had her in my life for 43 years.

And that is just life.  The good, the bad, the ugly and the all of it. It is the all of it that makes life so rich, so deep, so mosaic and so riveting. It’s the mistakes, missed opportunities, wrong roads, paths less traveled, the unexpected moments that take our breath away and truly make life worth living.

The best stories and memories aren’t when everything goes as planned.  We find ourselves and our joy oftentimes in the most assuming and surprising places along the way.   We find our life in the spaces of the hills and valleys of our heart and the tales it tells. We find our love in not only the happiness, but the sorrows.

And in the end, when I look back, I hope it’s as magical, as memorizing and as beautiful  as I imagine.

We just have to hold on, pray, have faith and breath. I wish I had some deep and fantastic thing to write about it. But the simple truth is we just have to live it. We just have to live THIS.