Life Is Short

All to often we focus on the wrong things. We tend to overlook the worthy things in life because we allow the good and soothing things that comfort us to be so quickly overshadowed by the problems, discomforts and unfairness of the world.

Since we have certain expectations of how our lives should play out, we take for granted those things that go well or right because that’s as “it should be.” If one stops to think about it though, that kind of prioritization sets us up for constant unhappiness and disappointment–always yearning and fretting about what could’ve, should’ve, might have been. We must give equal…no more than equal weight to those things that go right in our lives, expected, “normal,” or not. We are blessed in so many ways.

In that vein, I want to thank my dad for his service to his country so that I could grow up free to forget his sacrifices to self and family during his length of duty. I want to thank him for his struggles to regain a “normal” life with a difficult homecoming and family. I want to thank him for early morning home-made donuts and the trips to the bakery in town. I thank him for ice cream made from snow, for seeing if the engine idle really would pull the truck uphill without stalling, for teaching me to build a fence, cut wood and my first taste of Lowenbrau. I thank him for fostering my interest in mechanical things and letting me “help” work on cars, cameras, printers, and every other things that I probably “shouldn’t” have touched. I thank him for learning a way to throw a football with a broken back so that he could play with me. I thank him for the trips to the mountains and overlooks for no other reason than to enjoy their beauty. Most of all, I thank him for trying. I thank him for doing the best he could.

He isn’t perfect, my childhood wasn’t perfect and I was certainly not a perfect child. No one is perfect. No one can live up to the 20/20 retrospective replay of our lives and perceived wrongs and come out glistening and pure. So I also thank him for overlooking those things that children do that make us sometimes wonder why we procreate! We can only do the best we can…at that particular time and place and with what we have to work with (and that others may never be able to properly judge ). We can choose to change our focus or we can choose to wallow in the poor mes, the what ifs, the should’ve beens. I am choosing to be thankful today for this life I have, the blessings I’ve been given and the people in my life who have overlooked all of my imperfections, wrongs, misdeeds and general unfairness.

Thank You!