Day 1 - Glasses Half Full

A friend laid down a challenge, friendly like, and now some other people are writing. I'm one of them. Forty days, forty posts, any topic. Go. If you're the type, here's the Facebook page.

It's the best of times. It's the worst of times. It is the winter of my discontent. I feel as though I'm coming up for air after a long, deep dive into cold, dark waters. The death of a family member, as they begin to rack up, means you re-live each previous loss with even more pain inside. Now, on the other side of those experiences, I'm left feeling both vulnerable and invincible; able to shoulder this burden and about to collapse from the weight of it all.

Life goes on, interrupted but still the same. Ongoing. Like a river. Or a rock in your hand, smooth and about to be thrown. The anticipation of the moment it leaves your skin and sails through the air. Never as far as your imagination envisioned, never. Splash it hits as you retrieve another from the riverbank. Washed down from a mountain miles away.

The transitions of work, school, life and love lay out on the table before me. Graduation. Wedding. Travel. Job. Hopes and dreams. The stuff of legend. The more you want it, the less you control it. It's a funny place to be a person "without faith" putting so much faith in the continued good fortune of your life; the luck and happenstance that have led you to this moment, this place, this choice, this decision, this unknown consequence of other choices, less important though they may have seemed at the time, yet so influential to the current course.

Self portrait of the Artist, February 2012.

This post represents another entry on my part in a "40 Days of Writing" project entered into voluntarily and without coercion.