How Things Happen

We spend our lives watching things happen, making things happen, waiting for things to happen; a good percentage of the time we spend our lives wondering what the hell happened and WHY did it happen to us.  Sometimes, though, there comes a time when you grab the wheel and just decide to drive your own life.

I’ve officially been alone for two years now.  I know, I know….I’m not ALONE, but in the relationship sense I have.  What a journey of happenings it has been.  It’s like there was this vast expanse of roadway in front of me on that day, two years ago, that I put a signature on a piece of paper that ended 23 years of a bond.  It was unfamiliar territory for me…a little hostile to say the least.  It was almost like being dropped into a foreign country.  I didn’t understand the language, the customs, I wasn’t sure of protocol to say the least.  I wasn’t sure, after that long, how to be alone.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

I know what it’s like to be broken, what it’s like not to smile.  I don’t mean to imply in anyway that my ex-husband broke me.  We broke each other.  We allowed ourselves to run a marriage into the ditch, both of us knowing where it was headed and neither of us willing to take the wheel and correct the course before the crash.  As a cop, I arrived on many accident scenes….steaming heaps of metal, crying, wailing people…I just never thought that would HAPPEN to me.  I never thought my life would be that accident.  I never thought I would be the one walking around, dazed from the heart wound, but I was. 

I know what it’s like to be afraid, what it’s like to be afraid to open your eyes.  I knew I couldn’t be married, but I didn’t know how to be anything else.  It wasn’t that I was particularly good at it, I wasn’t…but it was what I was comfortable with.  For the first few months, I just kept my eyes closed.  I didn’t know what to feel, so I chose to feel nothing.  I felt nothing as I watched my ex-husband’s acute pain.  I certainly felt none of my own.  I was afraid, horribly afraid, for the first time in my life.  How did this HAPPEN to me, how did I, the girl that solved problems for everyone else, let this become my life.

I know what it’s like to wake up…not the jolt of the alarm wake up, but the gentle, sun rising through the window wake up.  The kind of waking up where you have to really struggle to get out of bed, wanting to stay there where it’s familiar, comfortable, warm…but knowing that your feet have to hit the floor at some point.  Those first few wake ups were brutal.  The kind where your head spins and everything is blurry, like a hangover…except Tylenol and Diet Coke don’t help.

I know what it’s like to appreciate a good day.  I don’t specifically remember my first good day after my divorce because it was a process, but I do know that after a few good days you start to feel.  It’s horrible at first, like when your leg falls asleep and you have that gnarly, tingly feeling when it starts to come around.  Everything in my life felt like that.  I was acutely aware of every feeling, they bombarded me so fast that I didn’t know what to do….so I did what I always do….I over-reacted.  I cried all day because the lawn mower wouldn’t start.  I broke things.  I burned things.  I pushed some people away and clung too tightly to others.  The important thing that HAPPENED though, was that things were starting to HAPPEN to me again.

I know what it’s like to regain feeling.  We’ve all watched Lifetime Television for Women and Gay Men….we have all seen that Hallmark movie where the girl wakes up out of a 345 year coma or the wheelchair bound man wiggles his big toe and then rhumbas across the screen.  Well, it wasn’t quite that dramatic for me, but I did start to wiggle my big toe, I did start to open my eyes.  When I opened my eyes and turned on the lights,  there was my life, right where I’d left it.  Things were in a bit of disrepair, but it was all still there.  A lot of the broken things I finally had the courage to throw away.  I was able to start to bandage the wounds I’d refused to see, I was able to FEEL again.  That’s when things really started to happen.

I know what it’s like to let go.  Remember learning how to ride a bike?  Remember that moment that your Mom or Dad let go of the bike and you had to pedal on your own?  Yeah, that’s what it was like.  I pedaled like mad, all wobbly and ridiculous looking. I’m sure I looked a fool. At some point though, I learned how to pedal my life again.  I’ve even figured out how to put the card in the spokes and make some noise.

I know what it’s like to be grateful.  The kind of gratitude that brings you to tears, like I am right now.  I am grateful for everything that has happened to me in my life.  All of those terrifying, paralyzing things that happened to me brought me here, to this place of contentment and gratitude, this place of an open heart.  I never thought that I would be the person I am today.  I always knew I COULD be, I just never believed I was strong enough to let it happen, but I am. I have learned to live more from intention and less from habit.

The most important thing I’ve learned:

I know how to be happy.  It doesn’t mean that I spend every waking moment smiling like an idiot.  I have bad days, I have bad weeks, but I know how to be happy.  I know how to self-correct and let happy just happen.  It’s the moment you take the oars out of the water, lay back in the sunshine and let the current of your life deliciously float you towards the ocean.  

Things happen now and I say, "Wow, how wonderful that this became my life."