Only the Marvelous: A Thousand Times I Tempted Fate

I love big sunglasses and this vintage pair was a great find!

A thousand times I tempted fate.
A thousand times I played this game.
A thousand times that I have said today, today, today.

Everyone has their own struggle. Everyone has their own scars. Most of the time, scars have a story to tell... of survival and strength. The truth is, after many times of self-reflection, I realized that we all do not know what other people are going through and dealing with... people have this extraordinary habit of putting up a front. Knowing this, I have realized to be gentle and more careful in how I treat people... because in the end, I have no way of knowing what struggles they are dealing with. I've transformed my worldview because I realized that sometimes, smiling, dressing up and looking your best is much more easier than explaining what's wrong. Health issues granted, I wore this to the hospital... my life seems to be a routine of home-hospital-home as of late. However, I refuse to look as bad as I feel because, at the end of the day, even this slight rebellion is my show of strength that I am not giving in to my circumstances. Life is after all about the details.

You see, our pain is ours. Some of it we have earned, the rest (and most of the time probably) not, and yet it is still ours. When we fight our pain, we fight the experience of our humanness, and we lose ourselves in the process. We go through so many coping mechanisms: escaping, providing ourselves with distractions, transferring our frustration to something else, and perhaps the worst, numbing ourselves from feeling anything. The fact is: a life without pain is a life of non-living. Our pain lets us know and come to understand the full meaning of being human... sticks, stones and broken bones. If we struggle and fight against the normal experience of our pain, we lose the possibility of its rusting into beauty too. At the end of the day, the best we can hope for is that our struggles have to be worth it....maybe not now, but in the greater scheme of things.

We do not need to seek pain nor do we have the right to inflict it on other people just because we are feeling it. But when it is inevitably there, we have the possibility of something new entering our lives... something to lead us to where we are supposed to be... something that will transform us to the person we were always meant to be... the person we always are. Our pain is a possibility. It is not a liability or a punishment, when we accept this, we can ride the storm- feel it, embrace it and rise up to the challenge.