I’m been alive long enough now to realize that the most important and empowering milestones in life aren’t only the successes and achievements, but also the failures and valleys. After graduation, my perception of life was along a linear line, being at a steady upwards curve until I died. I never anticipated the ebb and flow that life inevitably follows.
I know now that you are the master of your own fate, but that fate itself is also the master of your fate. Shit, I did everything I could to keep my mother alive, but she passed away in the blink of an eye from a stroke. I did my damndest to hold together a 7 year relationship that was riddled with co-dependency and alcoholism. The mental abuse and infidelity were hurdles that could be overcome, surmounted, and obliterated if I was smart enough and compassionate enough, in my mind at the time. I always considered my parents’ divorce a human weakness and blamed them both for not trying hard enough.
I started loosing people dear to me through age, drugs, alcohol, traffic accidents, suicide, and complications from AIDS. I cursed God because he always picked the wrong people to take out of my life. There is a hackneyed old adage that states “When God closes a door, he opens a window”. I always wanted to know why a loving God would play games with us like that, though. Sometimes the door is closed and the window is nailed shut. Does God then give us a hammer? There has got to be a better system for carpentry. After all, Jesus was a carpenter, right?
What resource do we pull from when we are in the valleys of our lives? Is it God or a perception of God? Is it a human energy and folklore that we trust will divine us to the next plateau, manifested in epiphany? Do we require a severe shaking like a cosmic Etch-A-Sketch to get us on a clean slate psychologically?
Without going into detail, I feel a door shutting. When I glance to my right, I see the window nailed shut, but I am holding a hammer. I hope Marc and I learn how to use that hammer soon.
*****As a side note, it's notable to me how the music of Nina Simone has always been there through the hardest times. God appears in different ways to different people I guess. Hand me that hammer, Nina.
