Years ago I watched a movie with Gwenyth Paltrow: Sliding Doors. The movie follows her life when she makes the train and when she doesn't. SPOILER ALERT: even though it's years old: when she makes the train she discovers cheating. When she doesn't, she still discovers cheating, it just takes a bit longer. The ending to side A and side B is the same. It gets you thinking: is final jeopardy already decided?
Having attended (subjected to, survived) 12 years of Catholic school this movie stuck with me. We were taught free will. Without it, how do you explain good vs evil, yin and yang, the Browns and the Steelers, the Yankees vs the Free World...
I have always been one to believe (yes, I do believe in some things, Virginia), that the person I am today is a result of my life experiences. (You take the good, you take the bad and there you have the fact of life...) The child within me has risen above...but what if none of these things occurred? Would I still be me?
Sailing through the changing ocean tides:
Visiting my baby brother in the hospital looking at a room of babies through a window seeing which one he was. I still remember sitting in the corner of a gray plaid couch when he came home so I could hold him (the corner so the arm could assist me in supporting his new born head, I later fed him spaghetti). To this day, I treat him like a child and a friend. He's my blood, he's my baby brother. He now prefers steak.
My parents divorce. I grew up. I looked out. I learned. I learned more than either of my parents would probably be comfortable in me sharing. Time makes you bolder, children get older.
Empathy. The first time you serve in a soup kitchen, the first time you help a child to read (and then later see that child on the rapid with a parent who is too drunk to listen), the first time you help at a school and learn that the breakfast you are feeding him/her is the first meal they have had since lunch at school yesterday.
Motherhood: the first time you hold your baby in your arms and know that you are a mother. That no matter what, you are a mother. The first time you run every light on a main road in an effort to get your unconscious child to the ER just a little quicker. The memory of that day still makes me cry, it was the worst day of my life. I am a mother.
Anger at the world. The first time (of many) you read The Diary of Anne Frank. The first time you see a man pick up a prostitute in a pressed/ironed shirt driving an A6 with a Solon High School sticker in the window. The racial slurs out of the mouths of kids.
Saying I do. Forever. (sentences start ending with: for the rest of my life), For better, for worse. Til Death (read that again, til DEATH). Building your life around the needs and wants of another? Maybe for the Hope Diamond? UGH. Disney doesn't teach you how hard this can be after the fairy tale dress gets put away.
The first time you lose a job when you have something to lose. The landslide can take you down.
College, Alpha Xi Delta: ...but without bitterness, or defeat, you must encounter misfortune and with humility meet success. So I will.
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