Last night was a looooong night. I was hurting pretty bad and couldn't sleep at all. I took pain meds, I took sleeping meds, and I didn’t sleep at all. Finally around
I must feel better though, I am Bitchy again. LOL. Tomorrow I am sending this lift chair back. I rented it for a month and am doing well enough that I can get along fine without it.
There are times in life where we are tested and the sort of person or people that we are determines what the outcome will be. People tend to take the path of least resistance. A group of people are even more likely to do this. Only when fate forces us to leave the easy path will we make changes. If the road is straight and smooth, we will seldom turn down a side lane. Even at crossroads we go straight on.
What we tend to think of as bad times are actually times of forced change. When the road FORKS, we have to make a decision. I’m sure that you have all heard the old saying, “Inside every black cloud is a silver lining.” Well, the bigger the black cloud, the bigger the potential silver lining. This is because very few of us actually live and perform up to anything like our actual true potential. What most of us did was find a comfortable niche and stopped there. Only when we are forced by circumstances will most of us move on and seek a better place.
As a country this is just as true, maybe more so, as it is for individuals. The progress in the over all human condition changed little to none for hundreds of years between 1600 and 1900. Then in the 100 years following every thing changed! World wide war made us move forward. Sadly we got comfortable again pretty fast and that is why we went to the moon in the 60s and then stopped trying. That is why in a world of almost endless plenty, millions still live in poverty and hunger still haunts the lives of millions.
In my life, there have been quite a few smaller black clouds. As I look back at them I see that in every case, the end result was that I improved my over all lot in life. Every time that a problem forced me out of my comfy little hole, I became active in guiding my fate and ended up better off. I lost a home in the early 80s when the oil industry went bust because of a surplus of oil. (After the last “the sky is falling” cause we are out of oil panic!) I was out of work for almost a year. I had to leave my boyhood home town to get a job. The end result was a new and way better life somewhere else that I have NO regrets about. Had it not been that I was forced. I would have just sat there, working at a pretty good job, satisfied but never fulfilled. My wife would never have returned to school and she also would have led a much less fulfilling life. It was ROUGH…but it was also a necessary transition if I was ever going to go forward.
We are all pretty nervous right now. The high gas prices and the uncertainties we face are frightening. The good news is that this is the ONLY thing that ever gets people moving. Someday we really will run out of oil. That day is still a long way in the future but we can’t wait until then to make changes. As long as the cheep and easy oil is available we won’t actively pursue the alternatives. Oil is too precious to BURN! It isn’t renewable. It isn’t very clean and is expensive to find process and distribute. In the 70s there were lots of good ideas, sadly as soon as the oil shortage became an oil glut, we laid all of this aside…Maybe this time we will do better.
No matter what, don’t fear the change. We will all come out the other side, both individually and as a people, better for the experience if we will just be proactive and thoughtful in our actions. Don’t get in a rush. Don’t make big changes all at once until you are sure which way the current is flowing. When the time comes to make a move; do it fearlessly with joy. Look at it all as an adventure because when you look back on it, that is exactly what it is.
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