Eating Cake....

There are moments when we retrace our steps, when we meet an obstacle and wonder how we got to that point. Curveballs are what most people call them. Those bumps in the road of life that we laugh about years down the road. But the first moments we encounter those bumps are not so funny. We seem to look up & down, to react at first rather than inspect. We flip out or calmly sit & leave the world for a second. Our minds don't want to face the challenge, they prefered traveling along life's highway with cruise control & barely breaking for the stop signs. But oh when one of those walls springs from the ground, looms over us with such disdain & creates shadows in what was a bright open day we find ourselves a bit scattered. Then our thoughts collect & we retrace. We retrace steps, motions, thoughts, intentions, whatever piece to the puzzle we feel is important we clambor through it. I have frantically searched my mind & memory on multiple occasions. Asking myself "How did this happen? Why did this happen?" I am the queen of constant bubbly personality, but the darkness enfolds even me a good deal of the time. That moment of confusion about the path is one that I do not enjoy, but for some reason over the past 7 years I have truly begun to embrace a philosophy: "no matter what path I took to get to this very moment, I am here for a reason. I need only to breathe, to look around, & find purpose in my next step."
That is not exactly the most comforting or even the best outlook sometimes, but I stay true to it just the same. I know that I may have made mistakes & those mistakes were in some ways really horrible; but the fact that I am now alive, able to have another moment makes the lesson from the mistakes so worth it. Imparting that 'wisdom' to others is daunting to say the least. There is one particular person in my life who tends to really dwell on hard times, to beat himself up when he makes a mistake, sometimes beating himself up to where he loses sight of the lesson, but focuses on his negligence instead. There are many times that the mistake is much more minor than he thought & then there are times where that mistake made such an impact that it weighs on his mind to this day. It hurts my heart to see him torture himself with some things, it is not a trait I envy at all. My easier going outlook seems idealistic & fantastical to someone of his downtrodden tendencies. I guess we balance each other, he is the realist - to a fault, I am the idealist - to a fault. We work well in a great many situations, but on this topic it can be very trying to my psyche. I want to help to be uplifting - he may think that I don't understand the consequences, that my light hearted response is too light, too naive - that isn't true. I know the bad side, the possibility of a harmful outcome, but I also know that if the worst does occur one of us has to be hopeful. It is a scary job to be the one who sees faith & hope in everything, but if it helps him make it through the hard times, then my job is like eating cake - sweet of course and you always remember how good it is....