We’re all gonna die…

There are times in life, when a corner is turned.  Sometimes, we are completely unconscious of it happening.  We aren’t even aware of that right angle that we just traversed.  Other times, you feel it; you recognize that a little flag of triumph was raised in your conscious or sub-conscious mind to announce your progress.

I’ve turned a corner.  It’s a corner that is the size of a very large racetrack, as it’s taken me a few years to get around it.

I used to be suspicious when life was good.  One of those, “Things are going so well, that I just KNOW it can’t last” kind of people. When life was glorious, I tiptoed around just waiting for the big, old thud of that other shoe as it hit the floor.

Well, that was my corner and it’s behind me.  I’m happy with my life and the dread is gone.  Vanished.  Well, not really vanished; its been a process and I’m so glad that I took the first step on that journey a few years ago.

There isn’t enough time and space here to outline everything that I did to get to this place, but it’s pretty well documented in each and every post on this blog.

What I’ve accepted and even embraced, is the reality that bad stuff happens.  Always.  If our lives are going swimmingly and perfectly, bad stuff will occur.  If our lives are already in the crapper, more bad stuff is in the offing.  That’s just the way it goes.  Might as well accept it and not let it ruin all of the beautiful times that in my experience, FAR outweigh the bad.

I also began to recognize what’s bad and what’s merely inconvenient or annoying.  We tend to categorize fairly minor bumps as bad, when they’re really not.  It’s a matter of degrees.  Begin to honestly categorize things on a scale of 1-10 and you’ll start to see that disasters are often not all that disastrous.

I’ve also learned to look around and see how other people are handling REALLY bad stuff.  Cancer, loss of a child/spouse or parent, a terrible accident, etc.  They keep going; pushing forward knowing it will be behind them at some point if they just keep getting up out of bed every morning.

Look, the truth is, we all die.  That’s it.  All of us.  Every single person reading these words has a finite amount of time.  I guess you could say that the ultimate ‘bad stuff’ that befalls us is death.  Ultimately, that is what we fear the most. It’s our most deep-seated fear and most other fears emanate from it.

We lose everything that is dear to us at some point, so when you accept that premise, the dread dissipates.  For some of you that is unacceptable and I understand that, but I won’t live that way.  Accepting death and impermanence has been very freeing for me.  It has, quite honestly, brought me to a place of joy.

Be well.  Be peaceful.  Accept what is.