Wednesday, January 2, 2013

I puzzled all day..... regrets....

I spent the day finishing a puzzle yesterday.  The girls and I had started it the night before.  It was a long time tradition in my family growing up.  I am not a good puzzler by my families standards.  Booboo is a great natural puzzler.  Yogie has a more my style interest.  I am determined it will be a new tradition in our little family.  I am good at finding where a certain piece goes in a puzzle and building on that.  Booboo just seems to be able to pick up a piece and put it where it goes, she always has been, I never seen a small child put them together as good as she could as a toddler.  Poppie is having a lot of pain with the cold so spent most of the day not moving very far.  It was a quite uneventful day here.  The girls abandoned us in the afternoon and went sledding with Mokie and family.  Poppie and I got Bubbles while they were gone.  A homey quiet day was nice, a sort of hibernation and restoring of our souls.  I didn't even turn on the computer once all day, sort of a nice thing and an escape.

I did have time to think most of the day.  I find it interesting that at the beginning of each new year we think of the ending years regrets.  We regret the things we did or didn't do in the past year.  We get all hyped up to change our year to come.  We want to make changes but all to soon the want does not become the change we had hoped for.  We, for the most part, are creatures of habit.  We don't make big changes in our lives, we are who we are.  Isn't that sad?  We may, or may not, want to change but the reality of change is difficult.  Think of the things people make resolutions about, weight, finances, relationships and who knows what, but most are wants to change important things in our lives.  The reality is that these kinds of things are hard to change.  We live the lives we do and our habits are just that our habits so real change to any one of these things is not about a resolution to be trendy at the beginning of the year.  Real change to any of these things would take life change and life change is life changing so is very very hard to put into real action.  Life change takes daily change, daily getting up and doing things that aren't our habits, if they were we would already be doing them.  Habit change is one of the hardest things we do in this life.  Living in a rut is how most of us stumble through this life.  We are predictable and that is what makes us the people we are. 

I think if you talk to a really old person they almost never have true regret in their lives.  They lived their lives with the ups and the down, they lived their habits, they changed them or they didn't, they have come to terms with their lives in a way we in the middle or in battle haven't as of yet.  If you asked a middle ager like me, am I really middle aged still? at 52 I know I am not living to 104, I have been past middle age for about 5 years, you know I am only living to 94.... I digress.  The reality is I am past middle age, or precise middle age anyway.  I am not old but in past cultures I am ancient so age is still relative to the current generation.  Sadly this is the first generation that our children's life expectancy is probably shorter than our own.  Is that regret?  I am middle age so unlike the old person I am at the age where people wallow in regret.  We have not yet become the wise of old age, we are in the age where we question all of our life habits.  We are probably the greatest among the resolutioners of the new years.  The young don't think they do any thing wrong and the old know they lived their lives to the best of  their ability at the the time the lived it.  They didn't do it all right but they did it with out an instruction book and they did the best they could.  It is we in the middle that are the biggest regretters.  We regret a lot of things, is that why some many of our ilk have mid-life crisis's?  Really how many people do you know that go nuts, whether it is the man with the phallic sports car or the new babe on his arm, that just through away a wonderful woman and marriage.   Or is it the woman drinking in secret because he left or no longer comes home, or the mom who is taking happy pills?  There are so many more examples of mid-life crisis's that I can't even imagine.  Is it that in our middle years, we are no longer needed by our children, our spouses are having the same questions and so many of us haven't spoken to them on a real level in years and we haven't a clue who they are?  Why is it that the middle years are hard?  Why are they full of regrets?  It is the old that will tell you that they don't regret because they have already been tinseled by the fire and the quench of the middle years.  They have been there, they survived them, and they no longer have regrets, well not the crushing ones that the middle aged let themselves be weighed down by. 

Regrets are a part of life as is any of the things we go through in this life.  Don't let the regrets of life destroy you, they are like anything something you face, conquer, and get past. Do you have regrets you can't put to bed? if so you need a friend (hopefully your spouse) to talk to. Okay for the modern, and lost among you, that don't have a friend to talk to maybe you can use a therapist but for the real people out there you have your family, your friends and most of all God.  There is no one, and I mean no one, more ready to listen to any of your problems than God.  He can help you with any and all problems, and regret is not the least among them..    Make a resolution this year to talk to God..... tomorrow.

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