What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

I’m sick…AGAIN. I suppose that should come as no surprise following the wet trauma of last weekend, right on the heels of just barely having recovered from a previous 2-week illness. I’m fighting this one tooth and nail with sleep, homeopathic remedies and chicken soup, movies, books…and NO antihistamines. While the homeopathic approach doesn’t eliminate the discomforting symptoms, it DOES promise to shorten their duration and lessen the severity. (I’ve not noticed the lessened severity, but am still holding out hope for the shortened duration.) If forced to choose, 3 days of average cold misery is far better than 2 weeks of misery and 2 rounds of antibiotics.

Having spent yet another weekend laying on the sofa under the influence of the dreaded mutated rhino virus, too sick to sleep, too sick to get up and DO anything, I’ve felt like doing little else other than follow the random ramblings of my mind. Between too much time to think, and watching I Heart Huckabees last night, I got to thinking…

...it is a funny thing, the course my life has followed. I entered this existence into a typical, miserably dysfunctional family and grew up as an odd, only child. I never really ‘fit in’ anywhere. You look at the stock from which you came and you have to wonder where you picked up such peculiar tendencies, as I’m so unlike any of them. I am convinced that somewhere within my Scotch/Irish father, there was some latent strand of DNA, that when combined with the strands of Cherokee and Dutch in my mom, formed the explosive sum total that became the peculiar me.

In my youth, I was a fiery, idealistic rebel. Open-minded, openhearted, resistant to and defiant of authority, believing nothing that couldn’t be supported by my own experiential evidence. It was, however admirable, the typical blind zeal of ignorant youth. And many of those qualities, which in themselves may have been pure, proved to be destructive nonetheless, when not tempered with wisdom, and led to many painful errors over the course of my life which brought me many hardships.

Then I went through a phase of following the norm of society – get a good job, buy a home, get married, raise a family, go to church every Sunday. For a number of years, that proved quite comfortable for me…until it all fell in on top of me and I realized that the life I thought so perfect was nothing more than an illusion I’d conjured in my own mind. Years of recovery from the devastation that had become my life followed. I was forced to face my own demons, to understand them, understand where had they come from, understand why I had entertained their presence in my psyche – it was only then that I could successfully eliminate them. It was a long, painful process. There were bridges burned, bridges that led to dark places that I know I will never return to. I’m sure there will more dark places uncovered along the journey inward, but none so dark as those. I have a vision, a perception now, that I didn’t have then, and an inner strength developed from the determination to not only survive, but overcome the obstacles.

Now in my later years, I find it interesting to find myself returning to the idealism and rebellious passion of my youth – idealism and passion now tempered with the wisdom of age and a lifetime of living and surviving my own mistakes – open-mindedness tempered with understanding that we live in a world built upon deception and the struggle for power – open-heartedness tempered with the understanding that true love does not always feel good, nor is it always tender, and it must NEVER be possessive – open-heartedness tempered with the wisdom that there remains the finest of lines between wisely guarding one’s heart and closing it off.

Look out world, there’s none so dangerous as the middle-aged hippie, rhino virus or NO rhino virus. Pass the peace pipe...