“You seem to have it all figured out.”
That’s what someone told me the other day. That since I write this page and seem to have an answer for everything, that I must have it ‘all figured out’.
I stopped for a moment, and thought it through, because there were a lot of possible responses going through my head. Some funny, some brutally honest. I decided to settle on something truthful, but gentle.
“I wish” I replied quietly. “I wish’.
Because my life is far from perfect. It might look that way from the outside, and it might sound that way because I try to keep this work focused on you, rather than on me, but I will share this with you.
The only way to gain wisdom is to have made a ‘lot’ of mistakes, and I’ve made them. So many it’s hard to count.
Some I’m still paying for, and will be for probably a very long time. Both literally and emotionally.
Yet in the midst of all that I have done, I can look at some areas of my life with a small sense of peace. Some days I really have to focus very hard to find them, but they are there. I have a wonderful relationship with my children. I have a wife who loves me and stands with me and by me, despite the fact that living with me is not easy.
There are good things, if I struggle to remember them.
I think part of what has drawn me to this work, and the other work I do to help people, is because it allows me to re-frame experiences in my life, and to try to leave a better legacy than the one I feel I have left so far.
If I can take a lesson from my mistakes, my experiences and my insights and share them with someone, then they were not all bad.
To steal a phrase from a movie “I’ve got a lot of red in my ledger, and I need to clear some of that out”.
I’m sharing this today because I don’t want any of you to labor under the false pretense that I don’t have bad days, or struggles, or times when I just want to sit quietly and do nothing.
I have those days all the time. I still make mistakes, I still try to change things. If anything, the further I go in this work, the more I see people hurting, and the more I feel helpless.
There are so many people hurting right now. All I can do is try to lift where I can.
So please don’t fall into the Facebook paradox, where you think that because I share the things that I have learned, that I knew these things before I was tested. Life doesn’t play that way. You get tested and then you learn the material afterwards.
So if you are struggling right now, please know that there are so many people feeling the same. Struggling doesn’t mean you are a bad person, or that God or Karma or whoever has it in for you. It just means that you are human.
We all have struggles, and we all fall sometimes.
You just can’t stay down.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings