Do you often wish you could step out of your life for a while? Just stand aside and watch it happening from a distance. If we could see it over time would it have a pattern? On the graph of our lives would the line be soft, meandering up and down, never too high or too low, a constant with no sharp edges or sudden ends. Or would it be sharp and stuttering, stopping and starting where the line has dropped off the graph or is broken altogether, never quite getting into a regular rhythm. I suspect most of us would have a life line that is a mixture of both but when the line suddenly switches without warning we have no choice but to cope with the change of pace. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.”
There are times when life walks over us whilst we are sleeping, and times when simply waking up means preparing for war. Sudden disasters happen when we least expect them and if we have been living life on the high road we are not prepared for the shock as we free fall into the lowlands. When life is good we feel good, we feel empowered and strong, we expect that if things go wrong we will be able to face them and move on. The reality is often that after the event, with the air forced out of us, wounded and in a dark place the opposite happens, the way back seems impossible, and stripped bare we have lost the armour that our previous happiness provided. Frederick Buechner wrote “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid”.
It is so easy when life has kicked us to the bottom to give up, to feel there is no way back, but as Winston Churchill said “If you are going through hell keep going”. This not the time to stop and if you are striving to get through hard times, then moving on is the easy option. So if you don’t like what you’ve got, go back to what you had, and by sheer will you can make the line on your graph rise again. With that will come the realisation that there are times you have to leave happiness behind, but as the graph of your life rises it is a state you will return to eventually.
Life is not fair, nor has it ever been, but the morning seems determined to dawn until it is. ~Robert Brault,
Title quote by unknown author