I Don't Care OR... Just Stop and Be Happy

Life, depending on how you look at it, can be hard sometimes.  OR...  If you just turn your head a touch, and look, you realize how really good it is to be alive.  I am, I have discovered, far too inclined to see life in the first sense, and not often enough in the second.  I am, it seems, forever wanting some undefined, nebulous thing which I do not currently have, and cannot seem to obtain.

Then I get all mopey and sad and dissatisfied.  I know it is all terribly unfair, and I know I am just not built for happiness, and I know that EVERYBODY ELSE drew the lucky hands... and got what I will never, ever be able to have.

It is such a crazy dance.  It comes from crazy, and it creates more crazy.  Because, here's the thing:  on a day when I have my head screwed on, I realize that my life is fine.  There is nothing at all to be unhappy about.  I am loved.  I love.  I am relatively well.  I have enough.  There are sweet, soft, gentle times sprinkled through all of the days, and it is not at all a bad thing.

The things that tend to make me unhappy are silly, unrealistic wishes:

• wishing I could go back and not do the hysterectomy
• wishing I could go back and not marry badly as I did
• wishing I could go back and not fall into the patterns that led to crisis and destruction
• wishing I could go back and not get to be so old
• wishing I could not have migraine headaches
• wishing there were more money and fewer worries
• wishing I could find the perfect romance that would make my life full of roses and violin music
• wishing I could retire now
• wishing I could work until I am really ready to retire
• wishing my kids lived closer
• wishing I had the ability to travel to see my kids whenever I wanted
• wishing there were more power dynamics in my relationship, but not so many that it would make me sad or mad

Wishing, wishing, wishing until the whole of my waking life is filled up with useless, endless, unproductive wishing for bits of nothing at all.  When it is all said and done, I am left exhausted and frightened and endlessly sad, with no idea where to go to change it at all.

Until today.

Today, sitting beside Tom, watching football, after a very nice morning and a good day together, I suddenly realized that HE is what I am wishing for.  THIS life is what I am wishing for.  The work I do is good and will suffice until I am really done -- whenever that may be.  And we will go on together to be who we are with one another.  There will undoubtedly be storms, but we've weathered those already, and will again.  It changes nothing.  My life is mine.  Fashioned as I have chosen to make it.  There will be times with more, and times with less, but it is all enough for me.  I choose, tonight and from here forward, to be grateful for this one moment in this one life that is uniquely mine.

Someone please, remind me when I get mired in the swamp again.