This has been a really rough week for me. My aunt passed away on Sunday morning and I was filled with sadness and even worse regret. You see I been promising to go home for the past 3 years since Juliet was born, and I still haven't made home. Deployments, moving, the fact that is now 4 tickets and this trip would cost a good $5k. I always had reasons to keep postponing. My aunt wanted to meet Juliet and she died without having that wish fulfilled.
All those reasons that I had before didn't seem good enough anymore. At the time, sure they felt like very good reasons, on Sunday they felt like excuses and it filled me with regret. I am 30 years old, I thought I was done with learning such important lessons, I have read fortune cookies, listened to famous quotes about time wasted, and yet I realized I don't know jack shit. I am still learning, and sometimes the lessons life teaches you hurt. They hurt a lot.
So yeah, to say its been a rough week its an understatement, so to not really deal with my feelings (because I don't have the time to fall apart), I drove myself into busy work. I cleaned garage floors, I packed, I organized, I cleaned my floors with toothbrushes, I have finished almost all my work for this quarter, but I was still broken. I was still sad and hurting.
Today I had absolutely nothing to do. My house is spotless. If I refold my sheets one more time, I will commit myself, so my friend suggested I start watching Greys Anatomy. I have never seen, 7 seasons are on netflix and a mindless numbing tv show will get my mind off things. Well I decided to follow her advice and started watching. It was just what I needed. To loose myself into some fictional drama and forget about my issues.
Everything was going great until one episode in which the main character said this quote :
--------------------------Meredith Grey: A couple of hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin shared with the world the secret of his success. Never leave that till tomorrow, he said, which you can do today. This is the man who discovered electricity. You think more people would listen to what he had to say. I don't know why we put things off, but if I had to guess, I'd have to say it has a lot to do with fear. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, sometimes the fear is just of making a decision, because what if you're wrong? What if you're making a mistake you can't undo? The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can't pretend we hadn't been told. We've all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still sometimes we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today's possibility under tomorrow's rug until we can't anymore. Until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin really meant. That knowing is better than wondering, that waking is better than sleeping, and even the biggest failure, even the worst, beat the hell out of never trying.
I paused, rewinded and listened to it again and again and again. I needed it to sink in and it did. I had a wonderful cry in the shower, picked myself up and decided to try again. Try to be better, try to make better decisions, really seize the day, because what else could I do?? I don't have the time to fall apart, and I don't have time to dwell on my mistakes and I don't want to. I want to learn from them and try to turn each and every sadness into something positive.
Don't get me wrong, I still miss her and I am very very sad, but now I am finally thinking about the happy moments, all the laughter we shared and all the advice she gave me. I am thinking of my amazing aunt instead of being filled with regret and for right now, that is good enough.
Love A
No comments:
Post a Comment