365

What a difference 365 days can make.  This time last year, for one reason and another, I was so anxious I could barely breathe.  Life had taken a series of disastrous turns and I was clinging to some ill-conceived dream shadows like they were wreckage and I was drowning.

Of course I WAS drowning - in a sea of grief – pummelled by waves of self- doubt.

They say time heals all wounds and I don’t know about that; maybe some wounds never really heal – they just scar over so the part of you that’s been injured can still do its job – but bears the marks of paths you’ve trod and the obstacles that tripped you on the way. 

So time might not heal, but it certainly provides its own momentum that sees us through its days til some morning you wake up and another zodiac has swung around, and you can see into the distance, and what you see looks bright instead of bleak.

From this end of the 365 days stretched out behind me, I have a kaleidoscopic view of day 1; its reality is reduced.  I can’t grasp that day and yet not one day since has passed without its shadow.  Even in the days of brightest sun – I caught it lingering there – creeping up on the light. But here is time again, turning its perpetual hands. They work the flesh of my feelings til they’re warm and limber – ready once more for action.

365 times I’ve said I can.  And now, I finally believe it.

I look to the horizon all around me and I smile.  These days have not turned out the way I once planned, and yet they’ve turned out the way I always planned. Time brought me forwards to the place I was before.

So if I say that I’m happy and my life was always this, do you understand that it wasn’t never that? Because that was so much.  But now it’s a shiny scar and I love it because its always with me as a reminder and the even-better bit is that I don’t still feel its pain.