Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes

"The Jews taught me this great word. "Schmuck." I was a schmuck, and now I'm not a schmuck." ~ Bill Murray as Frank Cross in Scrooged

We all change as we progress through what we believe to be a linear timeline, as we experience our lives on this wonderful blue ball circling a bright yellow dwarf star year after year. It doesn't require an astrophysicist to measure these transformations, nor does it require catastrophic life events to trigger them. Many of us progress from uptight to laid back, conservative to liberal and back, critical to accepting, closed minded to politically correct without any massive roadblocks thrown our way such as deaths in the family or other tragedies like addiction.

It's the maturation process that comes with living life. It is a natural progression we all endure in different ways base on life lessons learned or ignored. Normally this is a slow progression played out over decades.

Those of us who have experienced the blight of addiction in our lives and our families have learned this progression must be accelerated.

Keep moving, or die.

Like many of you I was a rager. Many people who know me now find this hard to believe. I fought The Addiction toe to toe, broadsword to broadsword until exhaustion would curtail the battle so the war could be continued at another time. Not realizing my energy expended to end the rule of The Addiction in my son's life only intensified its power over him I battled in our home and even on the streets in plain view of terrified onlookers. I disposed of paraphernalia and pot, physically forced drug tests on my addict son and engaged The Addiction in order to fix my son, all the while not knowing our baby was crying inside, overtaken by the vortex.

For the longest time I didn't know I had to change to live, even when this realization was placed directly ahead of me on my journey, I had no idea I was traveling on a pathway deeper and deeper into the abyss.  I chose to ignore this. The signposts were invisible in the fog and cloud forest of my creation. I was pushing my wife, my family, my life, away. I was so angry at my son for upsetting the family applecart and hurling it over the precipice, I began to fight everyone who might help me find a way out. I resisted every offer of assistance ignoring angels sent by the Universe. Fortunately for me, for all of us, The Universe doesn't give up easily. The Great Creator smiles on us as we struggle, knowing our time will come.

I had nowhere else to go. I gave up, stopped fighting The Addiction on its own terms and like the first collection of cells that crawled out of the primordial soup countless millennia ago I began a journey for which I had no direction, no goal. I just knew there was life out there for me if I only trusted what I couldn't understand.

Move or die.

Trust the unknown. Follow the signposts, believe in and listen to the angels you find along the way. Don't be afraid to accept the gifts that are there for the taking if you can only believe you are never alone in your journey. Accept that you can change. The transformation that awaits you is nothing short of a miracle. Actually, it IS a miracle.

It's a lot more fun than being a schmuck. Believe me, I know.

. . . keep coming back

"For that one fraction of a second you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping the stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence."  ~ Q, to Picard, Star Trek The Next Generation, "All Good Things, Part II"

"The louder our world today is, the deeper God seems to remain in silence. Silence is the language of eternity. Noise passes." ~ Gertrud Von Le Fort