Blog entry for:

or has my life become and opportunity to thrive? okay, i have all sorts of stuff on my mind today, popping off the last thing that came up, i can hardly believed the irony of me, stating exactly one year ago today, that maybe i needed to change some of the things in my life that i found unacceptable and more importantly had the power to change. part of moving beyond “just getting by,” at least for me, is to take action, instead of saying “someday.” the promise of a payoff is a powerful motivator for me, so for my birthday earlier this year i asked for a fitness tracker and signed up at work to get bucks into my HSA, by completing some “wellness” tasks, one of which was to walk at least 11,000 steps a day for sixty days. well that became habit, i am still walking those steps nearly every day, twenty-five pounds lighter and certainly in much better physical shape than a year ago. i will not run a 5K next week, but i did summit a fourteener, so the payoff, other than the dollar signs i saw, has been much more than i imagined. next up is remove tobacco from my daily life, to save twelve hundred bucks over the course of 2019. dang it all, i enjoy smoking cigars, but cutting back will certainly not kill me.
from taking care of myself to paying attention, once again something i came to recovery with very little skill in, unless it was watching for the opportunity to get something for nothing. this morning, as the dawg and i did our forced march around the neighborhood, she decided to have to poop twice and of course i only had one bag. a couple of options were available to me, and i considered all of them as viable choices:

1. leave her little package of wonderful behind.
2. walk to the next station get a bag and try and come back and find that surprise
3. get some leaves and snow and carry it in my gloved hand until i got to the poop can

i chose number 3 and in less than ten steps found a bag that someone had tossed beside the sidewalk. true, it was far larger than her little bundle of brown required, but it was there and i could clean the residue off my gloves and did not have to carry that package of joy any further. by doing the next right thing, which sometimes does not come easy for me, and by paying attention, things worked out. it is true, that had i not been so obsessed with making that decision and looked ahead i could have avoided the doggie do-do on my glove, but in the end it worked out, as those gloves really did need to be washed anyhow.
as i am running out of time, but not words, i guess i will close with this bundle of thoughts. where once it was a chore to live and all i wanted to do was find an escape hatch, life has become something to cherish, at least for me. i may not walk around with “positivity” beaming from every pore in my body, but i no longer live under a dark cloud. i am responsible for my life, my happiness and my actions and when i need to step back and look at what i think i may be “entitled to” i have to remember that once upon a time, i looked at myself as the victim of a horrible and cruel practical joke call life. just for today i am a bit better than that.

∞ DT ∞