Do you ever meet people or read about ones who totally turned their lives around?  People who were wrongfully imprisoned, or were addicted alcoholics, or had been brutally molested, or had horrifically abusive parents, or were disfigured in an accident, or lost everything and everyone of their family in a fire…people who REALLY have suffered.  People who would be justified in their screams and cries of “Why Me?!”  I mean real agony…not modern day middle-class ‘agony’ as in, “I can’t believe Comcast still has not come!” or “I can’t believe she canceled my manicure!” or “I can’t believe my Lexus won’t be ready til tomorrow and I still have to drive around in this Escape!”  or “I can’t believe the hot water heater is broken and it’s only 5 years old!” or “I can’t believe her soccer game is the same time as his band concert, what am I going to do?!”  …you and I have met THESE kinds of people…the ‘oh-me-oh-my’ uppity drama types, and I know you have, much like I have, wondered to yourself, ‘what would they do if they had actual real f**king problems?!”

There are people who have been to hell and back, and up the creek, and had to have the patience of Job to endure trials and tribulations that most of us can’t even being to imagine, who manage, against all odds it seems, to turn things around for themselves.  I have read about women who grew up in villages in Africa where they had little if any nutritious food and even less potable water, yet were brave enough and strong enough to walk miles to school, after working in the morning, so that they could get an education and make a life for themselves, and they did it!  I have read about strong handsome men who were crippled and blinded and burned in the preposterous unwinnable war, yet had the determination to try to heal and adapt and overcome, and did it!  I have read about women who had to bury their children due to incurable diseases or unexplained illness, who might have wanted to just lie down and die in despair and heartbreak, but instead managed to pick up the pieces of their crumbled dreams for their children and start a research foundation, and did it!  There are people who you might think would just throw in the towel…give up…but the human condition is generally such that we want to thrive.  We humans don’t want to give up, even when the circumstances might seem too grim to bear…BUT what is so bloody remarkable to me, and what I applaud and rejoice in, is people who make a choice that “THIS is not going to be my life” whatever *this* it might be.  If you find yourself feeling blue, or hopeless, or lost, or angry, or any of those emotions that make you feel Eeyore-ish, rather than sunny, joyful, confident,  and elated, celebrating Tigger-ish-ness, I implore you to think about people who have had a far more difficult time of it than you have, but managed to say to the universe, “Re-Write!”

STEP 4 is a celebration of living.