Life ain't just a bowl of cherries

I had a co-worker ask me for a repost of one of my previous blog entries today. When I went to look for it, I was struck by the fact that I have not written a word, recreationally for close to a year. How did that happen, I asked myself. As I cogitated on the question, I realized that it has been a pretty bad year.

An illness in the family, has rocked our world since Halloween 2009. for the succeeding 8 months, life became a process getting through one day in hopes that the next would be better. Unfortunately, every time we seemed to hit "rock bottom". we found out we were just on a shelf and that the rabbit hole extended far deeper. Sleep continually broken by nocturnal crisis, daily arguments and today's spent continually dealing with the fallout from yesterday. Chaos such that I have no really clear memories of what happened during that time, as I sit here now. I guess that the mind is a pretty resilient thing, in that it allows you to parse out bad memories and wrap them in a mental gauze that covers and softens the razor sharp edges that exist when they are viewed in their naked form. the result is that for a year many normal things have fallen by the wayside from holidays, to household maintenance and activities and in my case blogging.

We, the Curmudgeon family, have been lucky. Life is slowly taking on a sense of normalcy that has been building for 6 months. There are ups and downs, but like the Dow Industrial Average, the trend continues into generally positive territory. I see in our rear view mirror, many of the shelves that we stood on on the way down.

Nietzsche said, " If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back." and I realize that is true. My family has encountered something fundamentally different from what we were, or at least what we thought we were and it has changed us on an elemental level. But we are not alone. While our abyss dealt with illness, we have friends who have gone through divorce, financial problems, and on and on. Some have been able to turn from the abyss, as it appears the Curmudgeon's have, while others just can't turn their gaze away.

I think that for my family, we have reached the point where life has become almost normal again. As we go through our traditions preparing for Christmas, I realize how much I enjoy normal and simple. Before, I was always jealous of what everybody else had or was doing, not realizing how good I had it or how quickly what I had could be lost. So now I think I can content myself with simple and normal. I will enjoy what I have been given and the family I am blessed with while I hope that it isn't taken away again.