You are not alone in these transistions, past or now...

by John Meeker , Monday, July 13, 2015, 10:59 (3425 days ago) @ D. Sikes

Aging of our persons, changing relation ships, livelihoods, assorted health issues, investments, de-vestments, and just hitting the bottom line have cleaned me out a couple of times, It does require some bit of stoicism to know that you are back to just getting started -- over and/or again.

I'll brother up and say that the process is, short of terminal illness, on of the most soul-eating things that you may endure, in our peacetimes. You have to do the right thing, by those to whom you have obligations: 'whether or not' -- 'or whomever or not."

Now, I face a different version of this, and know that by the time I am done with a 'perfect storm' of health and aging and growing inability to perform the requirements of my trade -- that there a big changes we are facing. Over the nights of this weekend I was physically laid out with sleeplessness, pain, and nightmarish worry. By three-four AM this day, I was pretty much convinced that the stresses and injuries were going to sink my frail barque.

Somehow, dawn came, and coffee and some breakfast -- and I was still here. Now I have to disassemble years of lumber, tools, workbenches, specialized and hard to find items, and to cope with a reality that found me....Fate has two-edged sense of humour, BUT -- our Faith and God's hand to our endurance -- may take us beyond the these days, and into a new and lighter phase of 'owning' and 'family'. I once took years, to finally put a away a long-ago torch-fire of 'a passion forever." It wasn't. And it turned out that I had another life, and a good one, at that.

The opportunity to simplify complex and insoluble problems, is not easy or welcome. But with faith and a 'know it will get better' with time, there will come a day of owning yourself and life, again. I will say flat-out that I did not have that faith, when it started, back then. Now, my present situation is not perfect, but I know that the threads may be picked up and re-woven in a different pattern. There is a Caretaker, and the rougher it gets, the more you may find solace and the will to go on. As well, with that belief, there is no rule against a doctor prescribing palliative chemistry. It can lift a great deal of the stress, and enable you to better deal with the problems with which you are dealing.

I wish you the resource to continue, and that you add a some earthly chemistry to the present requirements. I write all this to you, having had bone aches, sleepless and relentless thinking, and a false certainty that this was 'it'. It isn't -- a change in life is not the end of life -- let those go who must. You can come thru it, and have a happier life, in the end by scaling our hopes and dreams and relationships to what the reality requires. Today I am blessed with a renewal of hope, that our present trial will produce a better and simpler life. May God go with you, and bring the light of the new future, to you.