It occurs to me. . .

That this journey we call life was never meant to be easy.

I’ve had a number of people remark that Maryan and I have had a “rough go” of it over the past four, or five, years. It’s true, we’d had as many challenges in the past few years as many folks have in an entire lifetime. On the other hand, I also know there are at least as many folks who’ve had it much “rougher” than we have.

There have been many days where I just wanted to scream: “Enough! It’s enough already!!”, and just as many days where I did scream it, at least mentally.

The truth is though, somehow, we’ve gotten through it all. The career setbacks, uncertainty and changes, the medical problems, surgeries, and, at times, inept medical care….

One day at a time, one problem at a time, we just kept living, walking the journey, and believing. Believing; that somehow we’d eventually emerge from the other side of the trouble, and finally be able to get on with “our lives” once again.

Of course, by “our lives” we meant the life we had before any of these things occurred.

The reality is though, that we are living “our lives”, everyday. These are the days, the times, we’ll tell stories about, remember, and almost wear as one of our life achievements. Wanting to remember the struggles and the victories, to remind ourselves what we’re capable of doing when faced with adversity.

There’s no doubt, we both miss the long motorcycle trips, meeting all sorts of strange, yet interesting people as we traveled. We both loved the freedom of the road, the anticipation of the next new place we’d see, finding that next new restaurant and the local specialty… Maybe we’ll get to experience that again, maybe not. Either way we have the memories. It’s possible that was just a chapter in our lives, and it’s over. It’s also possible that it’s a long novel, and all that’s happened is a plot shift and we’ll experience it all again, but in a somehow different way.

Life it occurs to me is in the day to day living, not in the past, or in the future. But, right here, right now, and making the absolute most of every moment we have, in the best way we can.

Maryan is home from the surgery now, and as I type this she’s actually sleeping peacefully, possibly for the first time on almost two years.

She’s still in considerable pain, but, and this might sound strange, this is a different pain, focused in the surgical sight and not radiating down her legs… I’m hopeful they might have actually gotten it right this time.

She’s an inspiration to me as you all know by now. Despite pain that has her near tears, and medications that have her emotions in an uproar… she still finds ways to make me laugh… still presses forward, pushes herself against the pain… refuses to give up, or let any of this “win”… determined to get as much of “her life” back as is humanly possible.

I wonder, often actually, what it is that separates us. Those of us who just can’t, or won’t, ever give up, from those that simply just say I can’t take it, and give up.

I’ve been fortunate to have been surrounded for most of my life, by folks who just didn’t know how to quit. It didn’t matter what life tossed at them, they just kept getting up, brushing the dust off, and then just started in again. Sometimes a lot the worse for wear, at others, once the dust settled they were in a much better situation.

As hard as it is for some folks to understand, hell it’s hard for me to understand sometimes, I continue to believe we’re in a better situation now, than we were 5 years ago, and we’ll be in an even better situation three months from now, than we are today.

It is a journey after all, isn’t it?




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