Family mementos and personal memories can be full of torture--or treasure . . .

I’m one of those lucky dogs that has few tragedies notched on my past. Mistakes, oh yeah, I’ve made plenty. I’ll get to that later. But I can understand if you think the general ease and happy-face niceness of the vast majority of my life makes me a poor judge of how to deal with doom and disaster. Mostly, you would be right. But it seems to me that the very cataclysmic contrast of a life spent virtually skipping through copses with a basket full of violets with the few moments of direness is precisely what makes me think extra hard about what to do with such beastly times. The only benefits that I’ve been able to drag out of horrors (real and imagined) are that (a) the stark contrast with the larger part of my life makes me appreciate that happy-go-lucky stuff all the more, and (b) there is always, however hidden in the miasma of awfulness, something to be learned.

Trust me, it’s not the sort of learning I seek or relish. But if I can’t find some useful atom of how to move ahead more meaningfully and joyfully in my existence from what’s happened, then I must either perish from the agony forthwith or I had best figure out how to compartmentalize the bad and leave it wholly behind as an untouchable Pandora’s box of unwanted nastiness. There’s simply no going on if the worst of life is allowed the power to rule the rest of life. You must understand that I am not remotely advocating suicide or even gloomy wallowing here. Wallowing is only useful if you’re a pond-dweller and can appreciate a good spa-like mud bath to soothe the soul. Fellow bloggers and authors and pundits all over have preceded me in saying it, but I will doggedly (being a lucky dog I’m allowed) insist as well that happiness is a choice. So what I’m advocating here is finding the mode by which you are able to imprison the useless or defeating monsters in your own life, learn a better and more gratifying way to operate, and get on with more joyful living.

Every bit of leftover history holds the key to some new door to adventure . . .

What the over-arching pleasantness of my personal history tells me, especially when I dig deeper into my ancestral, cultural, and human roots, is that all of my predecessors had similar choices to make when it came to living a full and fulfilling life. They often had rockier paths to travel, greater obstacles to overcome, more suffering or illness or sorrows along the way, than I have on the whole, yet many of them are remembered as having been people full of life and light in their own ways. Clearly if it isn’t instantly easy and obvious for a pampered person like me to find the way to the fabled land where one is always (in my celebrated brother-in-law’s phrase) Maximum Happy, then these people chose their paths to contentment and pleasure carefully and willfully–and somehow succeeded. So I’m always on the lookout, when I pore over their stories and artifacts, to find any clues about the native intelligence, serendipitous grabbing of good luck, and clever plotting that took them up, over and through to a more glorious outcome.

Even the things that seem fixed and eternal are subject to the vagaries of time . . .

The main truth I’ve found consistent through all of this is that, since each moment of triumph or tragedy is utterly unique and each of our individual experiences of it all the more so, learning and making choices and moving forward gets done in small increments. Time, as the piece above is titled to remind me, Changes Everything, and my being willing to move forward with the passage of time, ready or not, depends on my choosing to do so with a personal determination to find whatever wisdom, peace and happiness are possible for me, wherever I happen to find myself in the grand timeline.

Yes, I am smiling just thinking about it. How wonderfully shallow of me, eh? How lucky I am that little things can go so far to please me!