Taking Stock – New Year’s Intentions

I am not much of a New Year’s resolution or party person. Truthfully, Randy and I stay at home every year, watching movies or…whatever.  Tonight, I feel sure it will be movies, I mean, come on, he had a double lung transplant in September after being on life support.

Today,  I am reviewing the past year, and trying to get a handle on what I have learned from it, and where I am going from here. Change isn’t coming, it has already arrived. Change is unavoidable, it is how we handle it that makes the difference. So, how am I going to handle it?

2013 has been one of the most challenging and difficult years of my life. It brought illness, suffering, and the loss of loved ones. Days, weeks, months spent in hospital waiting rooms, the challenge of letting go, not only of those who have passed, but of my adult children–so what is the lesson here?  Or is there one?  Does there always have to be a lesson, or do bad things just happen, whether or not you are “good”?

Is there really something in existence like “karma”?  2013 also brought us the miracle of Randy’s survival.  Perhaps there is a season for everything. I look to 2014, and hope that the season will be more… temperate.  I will do everything in my power to make it so. Change has arrived, but changes, I find, still need to be made.

When I was growing up I was pretty sure that by 2014 we’d be the Jetson’s, you know?  I still don’t have a hovercraft, or live in a sky ball, but when I thought of the year 2000, my picture was of extreme technological advances. And there certainly have been.  Who ever thought you could actually have your own computer, let alone carry it with you?

As advanced as we are, 2013 brought fresh reminders of simple truths;  that life cannot be counted on, it is fragile and although we don’t realize it, we could lose it at any moment.  I am still pondering the ironies of my life: who could have ever thought that, like my mother, my husband would be chronically and critically ill in his mid fifties?

Continue reading this post on Tam Warner Minton’s blog, Travels with Tam