Let's Go Back...

Remember when you were a kid, and you got excited about everything? It was pure uninhibited excitement, without fear of disappointment and hurt. I remember sitting on a large decorative rock outside my new apartment building when I was about 4, waiting for a 'surprise' my father said would be coming for me. We had just moved from one end of the city to another, leaving behind the only friend I ever really knew up until that point. She lived in the flat below us, and was older than me by about 3 or 4 years. She was beautiful, kind, funny; she was my idol. Sitting on that rock I imagined all of the things it could have been. Not once did I imagine I would see that little red car pull up over the hill with the sun gleaming off its roof sending bursts of light back into the early afternoon sky. There she was waving out the window looking as excited as I was for her to be here, visiting me in my new home. In that moment, as I jumped off the rock, racing to meet her car, I never would have believed it if you told me I would never experience excitement like this many times again, excitement that wasn't tinged and marred by apprehension and anxiety of all the things that might go wrong. Because up until that point, nothing ever had.

As we grow, if we are lucky, we experience all the good things that life has to offer in a way that allows us to appreciate life to its fullest as a responsible and capable adult. But I think it's terribly sad that over the course of our life, we come upon moments that rob of us of our ability to experience the joy of things as we did when we were young. We dash our hopes before they have a chance to grow, far too often in my opinion, in fear of disappointment. We should be allowing ourselves to indulge in the 'what if's' and 'if only I could's', and understand that if we've handled this much disappointment in our lives, we can certainly handle a little more.

What won't kills us, will only make us stronger!