Lately ....

Maybe it's just me, but people seem cranky and/or melancholy these past few days. Maybe it's because the end of summer is in sight and we didn't get everything done that we wanted to. 
Perhaps it's because the world seems like it's in disarray lately, and it only looks like it's going to get worse. 
It also seems like a lot of the people I know have had to deal with tragic losses the last couple of months. Beloved friends and family members, and cherished pets have passed on, leaving us all with a hole in the world we can't quite get our heads around yet. 
The good news is, there's still plenty of summer left, and a lot more summers to come. You may not get all the things done this year by September, but there's still plenty of time to do a lot. If not, you always have next summer to look forward to, a target to pull you through those winter months. 
The world has always been in turmoil. We can usually live with that fact in the back of our mind and get on with our day, but sometimes we are forced to face it. So we will do what we need to do to fix it, and someday in the not too distant future, things will be back to an acceptable horror level and we will slowly forget the hell we are living in now. 
We will also heal and the losses we suffered will become more manageable everyday. That does not mean that we will ever forget the ones we've lost, but we will process all the grief, as well as all the anger and guilt and other rational and irrational emotions dredged up by the trauma. We will find a way to live with that hole they left, and avoid falling into it with every other misstep we take along our path. 
We will find a way, that's what we do. We will cope, we will work hard, we will escape the world and it's problems now and then, and we will endure. 
Everything doesn't matter at all, and everything matters more than anything. It is up to you to decide where in the spectrum between those two extremes all the things that make up your life will fall. Good or bad, ultimately it is how we choose to react to it all that sets up our lives going forward, and we make those choices a thousand times a day without even thinking. 
Whether we choose wisely or poorly, it makes no difference, because it can almost always change in an instant with just another choice. 
That's about the greatest gift we possess, and the one we most often forget we have.