Starting Over

 The Stuff of a New Day...

Beginning Again

The years will never take away
Our chance to start anew
It's only the beginning now
So dreams can still come true.

                                   Gertrude B. Mclain  

I have listened to many people pour out the pain of their lives.  There is one indelible lesson I learn each time.  The most painful wounds are self-inflicted.  All of us go through painful times in our lives, suffer profound losses, face into the brokenness of our lives and those of others.  Shakespeare's slings and arrows of outrageous fortune come from us.  Let me say emphatically that the pain in our lives is real.  The problem is what we tell ourselves about them--especially, the resignation that we cannot keep going.  The stones in our lives fall silent...to be true to this blog's theme.

Look a Piglet--is it just a kid's story.  He goes off to a birthday party carrying a balloon.  He falls on it and B*A*N*G--it explodes.  Okay, that's a loss for him.  But look what he tells himself about it.  He falls on ground and tells himself that "the universe has blown up, or at least the forest part of it has."  So he lies there on his back giving up!  Then, he finally determines to get up and get going.  "No sense lying here on my back forever," he says.  

Is that a kid's story, or the wounded kid in us that gets hurt in life and cannot carry on in life?  Okay. If you read this blog, the last two posts have been about the filters we use to interpret our experiences.  Experiences are neutral. Two people with the same experience can interpret them entirely different.  Piglet chose to lie on the ground.  Or, what we tell ourselves can ground us in reality.  We can challenge our irrational thinking.  No matter what we suffer, and it can be great, the sun does come up the next day and we can begin anew.  Besides. Lying on your back is not a great way to see life.  New days begin with or without us.