Good, bad choices we make matter
I’ve been thinking a lot today. What allows one to have a privileged life while another suffers daily? Why might I miss home when I sleep in my own bed every night? What makes me giggle when my wife enters the living room in the morning with a cute dance and an, “I love you?” How much of life will I be allowed to inhale as I reach middle-age and inch closer to my demise? Why does my stomach knot in gleeful anticipation when I know my daughter and granddaughters are coming over for the day? This rollercoaster of thought makes me feel alive!
Thursday morning I drive past the homeless aid center, Fresh Start, and see five bodies huddled under a blanket at the entrance of the building on this 20-degree morning as 10 other quivering soles envy the body heat embraced by the blanketed few. Those under the blanket are smiling, as if hiding a secret only privy to the few special enough to understand the joke. I wonder; how does one get to this place in life?
My thoughts quickly evaporate as I remember today as the day my father was born. Pop’s, who died two years ago, would have been 74 years old today had he beaten the disease that raped his body and mind. I loved my dad but he died too early.
I had more of me to share with my father. I planned to share my dreams, goals, fly fishing for cutthroat trout on the Coeur d’Alene River, my hopes and desires and hunting elk on the Montana/Idaho border. I had a thousand questions to ask my father in hope of better understanding myself. Why did you struggle to love those who were closest to you? What demons gave you a short fuse and why did you love those who hurt you the most? These questions go unanswered.
Naturally, my thoughts then slowly envelop my mother, who died last November from too many cigarettes and too much worry. As I search for my roots, my home, my heritage; I struggle to understand why those most important to me are no longer with me. My biggest life-questions will never be answered. Why do I constantly try to please? Why am I so driven professionally? Why do I struggle to allow people into my life?
The answer is in the immediate. I am not who I am because of my parents. I am who I am because of me. I am who I am because of those I’ve rubbed up against. I once read we are all like vases that rub up against each other. Some people are steel vases. When they rub up against another vase, they are solid, do not change and remain rigidly the same. Others are vases made from glass and when bumped against become fragile and break. Then there are vases made from clay. These vases bump up against many other vases but instead of breaking or remaining ridged, they slightly dent. Everything the clay vase bumps against affects the vase while never changing the vase’s ability to carry water.
Everything and everyone that I’ve bumped against in my life affects me but does not affect my ability to carry water — my ability to own my own life. Driving by homeless folks huddled in blankets on a cold January morning offers empathy for the difficult plight of those less fortunate than I while strengthening my dire to succeed. Parents who raised me in poverty, struggled to understand this quiet boy who failed academically while loving me unconditionally created a sizable dent in my exterior but never damaged me as a child.
My wife, daughter and grandchildren bump into me and create a giant positive dent that changes me as a person. They break through my exterior into my inner-soul. When they smile, I smile. When they are sad, I am sad. When they celebrate, I am the birthday cake and the fireworks.
As I continue to think I decide: we all have decisions to make. We can whaler in sadness, dysfunction or carry anger from our past or take control of our life and own our present; our now. Every person I’ve met has a story, often sad, to tell of how they were mistreated, un-liked, bullied or hated by the people they love. I offer we have a choice. Be a vase made of steel, glass or clay. The decision is ours.
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Send comments or other suggestions to William Rutherford at bprutherford@hotmail.com or visit pensiveparenting.com.