The Wild Ride

"When we talk of tomorrow, the gods laugh." ~ Chinese Proverb

Parents of children who have fallen to the disease of addiction often refer to our journey as an adventure. This occurs when we have begun to distance ourselves from The Addiction while pulling closer the souls and hearts of our children who have unwillingly succumbed. We use phrases like letting go, the wild ride and who knows where our pathway will lead us.

It can sound, sometimes, as if we are living mindless directionless lives, throwing caution to the wind as if our collective family crest is emblazoned with a bear shrugging its shoulders with the word for Whatever etched in Latin beneath.

Not so fast!

While our journey may seem random and at times deliberately so, it is the pathway we choose on a daily basis that can determine where we will emerge at the end of that particular day, in a month or year from that day. This is the mystery, the thrill of the unexplored that makes our daily expeditions so magical. Each day as we embark in any particular direction we make choices to be grateful or resentful, happy or forever disappointed, to persevere or stagnate, to approach our true REAL or to allow The Addiction to sidetrack us.

Sometimes the burdens we have not yet released are too much to bear. Sometimes it may be difficult or impossible to see any light through the limitless dark canopy of the cloud forest into which we may have stumbled.

We will emerge. We will find a way out of the morass.

Then what?

It's the call of the WILD RIDE that beckons us to take that first step, to be grateful for how far we have travelled, to shake off the cobwebs and muck of the darkness and look beyond to the unknown, the possible. We may not know at the instant of that first reluctant stride toward our newest pathway where our steps may lead. This is when we must TRUST that by doing our best to strive for our truest REAL the rest will follow. There are rainbows ahead, challenges and victories to be met and achieved.

There is unimaginable beauty and satisfaction just over that next horizon. We can become better than we thought we could be. We will see the futility in remaining bitter about our children and learn again to love them, separating them from whatever addiction has taken them from us. We will be astonished at the gifts the Universe bestows on those who accept that each of us deserves a life of happiness, abundance and community.

Go ahead, take it. Take the gifts of friendship, the opportunity to grow, prosper, LIVE, LAUGH AND LOVE. Don't worry about what is just over that horizon. Each progression we make that is true to our truest selves brings us closer to whatever joy and jubilation await us.

The plan is for today.

Our future is blissfully uncertain.

Bon voyage!

... keep coming back

"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip, the trip takes us." ~ John Steinbeck