Hope Floats

 

First and foremost... I hope everyone had a great summer in spite of mask wearing, social distancing... and coming to terms with the sometimes harsh realities of the current social, global and political situations that have culminated since covid-19 made its way into all of our lives... but enough about that... so... I did not get my book written this summer... not even close... but I got the outline reworked and it's back on track to what I wanted... sometimes you have to start over to get it right... but back to that later...

Secondly I want to thank everyone who has been reading for the last (gasp) six years... time flies, and thank you readers who joined along the way... I encourage anyone who has not had a chance to go back and read some of the archival pieces to do so... I did this past summer and gained some much needed insight to where I've been and were I'm headed going forward.

If you have been following me for the last six years or so... you undoubtedly know that summer is my favorite season... I started this writing, remembering and looking forward adventure in September for a reason... It's still summer (more or less) but there is something sweet in the September air like no other time of year has a smell that is on one hand completely familiar and on the other something  completely new and fresh that is light and easy and the perfect time for a new beginning...

I'm one of the few people who never minded going back to school at the end of summer vacation because it offered the opportunity to start something new (not to mention new clothes and shoes)... and so here we are again starting a new dance... Someone told me a long, long time ago "Don't be afraid of starting over again... because you are not starting from scratch... you are starting again from experience"... those words have helped get me through some very difficult times and helped to make sometimes seemingly impossible decisions... but that is the beauty of looking back... you can take note of the mistakes and the triumphs and utilize both for your current play book... I want to reiterate what I told a reader who sent me an e-mail last year... "You can't cling to the past... no matter how tightly you want to try to hold on to it... it's already gone!" The best you can do with it is use it to help shape the flow of today into tomorrow... but I do want to add that memories of people and events can be one of the most magical elements of our life so long as you keep it all in perspective and give the past and memories the reverence and respect that they deserve and keep it all in the past and don't try to relive or rewrite it.

So that brings us to today and "Hope Floats" it's a title of a movie from  1998 about a woman who has to start over... the actors are Sandra Bullock, Gena Rowlands and Harry Connick Jr... I have not seen this movie since it came out... and if memory serves I saw it during a flight from NY to LA... but what is seared in my memory is the opening where Bullock's character is humiliated live on national television (on a fictional Ricki Lake-(esque) type show) by her cheating husband and her best friend about their infidelity that they have been having an affair and are deeply in love... blah, blah, blah she has to take her young daughter and move home with her mother (Gena Rowlands) and pick up the pieces of her shattered life by examining her past and coming to terms with where she is now and try to put some of the pieces back together again and/or start from scratch in some areas.... I won't go into the details of the movie in case you want to see it... but I've thought about it as I've been navigating the course to find a new road and finding the courage to start again... in my case thankfully I did not have to do it alone... my partner in crime and I had to face some difficult realities with the world, our life and the people and events that once were the focus... but life like art sometimes get a rewrite for the second act and not always with a reliable road map... 

here are some of the things that helped...

When all of this started I said to myself... "If I die because of all of this did I get everything I ever wanted out of life?"... the answer is no... but I got the things that made me happiest and I came to the sudden realization that this was not going to kill me and I still had a lot of happy times and people ahead of me... and now was the time to trust the magic of endings and new beginnings.

I had to really sit down  and (this is where a notebook and pencil come in really handy) think about and visualize what kind of life I really wanted and learn to say no to or give up things  and sometimes people that were not part of where I was going.

It does not matter who or what I used to be... all that was important was who and what I was becoming... and I had the choice of choosing happiness, optimism and kindness to start the journey of self-discovery.

I made a to-do list and everyday I looked at it and asked myself "is what I'm doing today getting me closer to where I need to be?"... if it was not I made adjustments as necessary. 

Lastly and perhaps most importantly... we discovered who our real friends are...

So that was the start of the journey... I'm still finding my way... but looking back on some of the things in the past helped because I learned that you really only see and understand what you have inside of you from living and experience... we had to do some real soul searching and make some heart rending decisions a few times... and I remembered something in the me from a long time ago that I only recently found an answer to... "You can not criticize  someone else's choices  unless you fully understand their reasons for making them"... that alone helped me get rid of an avalanche of almost lifelong frustration and resentment... the thing that is most important to remember when dealing with resentment is that it's like swallowing poison expecting the other person to die.

All of this is what I found from a movie I saw 23 years ago on United Airlines... that I needed the experiences I've had to remember them and make some sense of most everything for the last few years. Oh and one more thing... someone told me once... "Don't loose hope... you never know what tomorrow will bring you."

See you next month... before the new lineup of television starts I encourage you to take a look at the archives... because there is nothing on television right now... Trust me... I checked!

It can be exhausting living in a world largely inhabited by stupid, insensitive people... take time to yourself to rest and recharge.