I use a lot of water/ocean/lake metaphors. What’s up with that? Send me something more inspirational. e-mail me, facebook me, message me, whatever. Send me something to write about. Reblog so all your friends can do the same. Inspiration can be found in the strangest places…..

The ocean washes its own shore, rocking back and forth by it’s steady tide. She sits on the dock, surrounded by the bay of salty, frigid, see-through water. It is clear, beautiful, dangerous. She watches the sun rise, boats in the distance, morning streaming it’s way into the world slowly and elegantly. The sun breaks the stillness and reminds every piece of nature that it’s time to be alive again, herself included. The waves rush over her dangling feet, washing them of the previous paths she has walked. The shipwreck has sunk to the bottom of the unforgiving sea, but she has been saved by a lifeboat. Smiling, she breathes. Refreshing Grace washes over her. It stings and cleans all the same as the ocean water. Heartbeat as steady and dependable and the rising and falling tide, and strong as the rushing, foamy waves. She lets it go. It’s time to do more than just get by.

Oh, it was bittersweet. A temporary lesson of what love is supposed to feel like. To never accept anything less than a replica of the way you made me feel that morning on the steps. We got up so early…before the sunrise, in fact. You greeted me with the sweetest kiss I have ever known. It sent chills through my body even more so than the unusual chill of the morning air. You held my hand the whole ride into the city, your other arm wrapped around my shoulders, face in my hair. If one needed to summarize happiness, all they needed to do was capture this moment. After breakfast at a small diner across the street, we sat outside and watch the sunrise. You held me in your arms and we both smoked. Yours, a clove. To this day, the sweet smell reminds me of what your lips tasted like. The sun shined on us so lovingly and we watched the people mind their own business as they walked past us. It was only a matter of days but god, that was enough for us to fall so deeply. We couldn’t get enough of each other from day one. Waves of emotion came over us at the airport. Swelling, and crashing with each kiss. White foaming waves washing us clean of everything in our past that made us who we are. We were permanently changed because of this. Every minute we spent together raced through my mind in fast forward. I knew from that moment I stepped onto that plane that I would never be the same. I cried silent tears as it split through the clouds, thousands of feet from where you stood. I remembered how your breath smelled like whiskey, because on the way out, we went into the bar spontaneously and took a shot. It stung so badly yet brought the most comforting feeling to my bones, almost like a forewarning of what was to come.

[Note: This is an oldie but a goodie. June 2010.]

At this point, I don’t know where to start. I feel as though life is hitting me like a ton of bricks. No, scratch that, I feel like life is coming at me like an 18 wheeler semi-truck filled with enough bricks to build a three story house. And here I am, standing in the way. Do I stay here, let it hit me and build myself from the ground back up again? Or, in the case of what most would do, do I run out of the way only to make sure that my heart is still pumping fast as ever and that I can feel my stomach in my toes… just to make sure it’s still there? There are endless options on the road of life, but this time I’m standing right in the middle lane, waiting for it to hit me. I’m contemplating where things go from here, and I’ve got to make a decision about which way to jump. Sometimes I wonder how people do this, how they transition from being a teenager into being a full-fledged adult. It’s not like it comes gradually. This transition comes in one full, swift, violent move that takes you under like a wave in the Atlantic. The end result only results in two options: sink, or swim.

My summer has been a dream. Minus all the dramatics, death, tears, sex and lies. It went off with a bang on my 21st birthday and from there has been a whirlwind of all these things thrown into a blender and some happiness, laughter, booze, sunshine and love thrown in for extra flavor. I tell myself I know who I am, but when all these things come out and I taste it, I’ve got a pretty sour bite. Put whiskey into the mix and you’ve got yourself in a few bar fights, too. I quit my job to move away from the only summer I’ve ever known just to collect my thoughts. And here I am, and here are my thoughts, collecting like rain in an empty bucket. I’m making this attempt to decide what I feel inside, whether it’s so empty that you could hear a pin drop from the top of my head down to my toes, or whether it’s that I feel so filled with love that it’s sometimes hard for me to form words. But in the end, I think that happiness comes at the end of the day, when you’re laying in bed crumpling up your thoughts for the day. Who are you surrounded by? Are you in an empty house, or is it full of the ones you love? I’m blessed enough to have every single one of my friends currently living within a three-block-radius of me, and for that I am ever grateful. The ability to walk across the street when I feel too alone has been a gift at the least. Especially in these hot days of summer, when the heat sinks into my bones and rattles them up and shakes out all the sadness I feel about the loss of my grandfather. There’s another flavor you can throw into the blender, one that comes with its own separate set of emotions. A hero, he was- not just to me, but to many other people. I have learned since his passing that people never really, fully mourn those they lose, but continue to bottle it up inside them in an effort to make them feel stronger. It doesn’t work. I learned that last night, after I had bottled it up for a long three weeks and let it all out at once. The combined effort of nightmares, memories and an aching heart all burst through at one moment in a quick kick to my pride when I couldn’t stop myself from crying in front of people who had never really seen me be anything but happy. I don’t really know how it came to be that tears make you look different in other people’s eyes, but maybe this was a good thing.
I feel sometimes like I have more to say than other people do. I sit in places bustling with people and I make up their life stories. I wonder who out of this crowd has ever been in love, whose had their heart broken, whose family provides them with everything they need, which ones have absolutely nothing. Sometimes I go too far and my thoughts get jumbled and twisted and I end up having their life story be something completely awful. At times I watch people walk by and wonder if they’re the one I’m supposed to be with the rest of my life. I also wonder if others do this same thing, or if I’m the only one who is curious about the person next to me at a stop light or behind me in the grocery line. Some days I’m just so full of thoughts that when I open up my computer, a document doesn’t open fast enough for me to spill out my words onto the keys and they overflow into nonsense. I go back and proofread and wonder why I think the way I do, why it always seems to make such sense to me when it’s on a screen or printed into writing but never in my head. My somethings turn into nothings which develop into ideas which turn into stories and then back into somethings. It’s all a process that I’m sure no one else can really grasp. I’m okay with that.
Here’s something. I’m falling for this boy, one who completely and totally isn’t my type at all. He’s a fraternity boy, who not only has a little bit of a southern Ohio drawl, but has a sense of humor that could make an entire room full of people laugh. And not the kind of humor that attracts girls and makes him look like a cool, funny, tough guy- it’s the kind of laugh that’s genuine, that makes people want to be around him because he radiates this sense of happiness. He feels like the sheet that you simply need only to know something’s covering you on a hot summer night, even though you could probably sleep with nothing on. He is comfortable, yet completely exhilarating. He refuses to wear a shirt most days and makes fun of my dirty feet when I won’t wear shoes. I will not admit that I’m falling, because it purely feels more like flying, or jumping off the highest diving board. I cannot wait to feel that cold water flooding my body when I hit the deep end.
Here’s another something. I am finding that I’m not the only one who overuses the word love. I am not the only person who simply needs to tell those surrounding me how I feel about them on an hourly basis. Having all these people I love within this three block radius has literally made me feel surrounded. And I like it. It’s like a tiny barrier of walls that I know will protect me in case of danger.
This is only an ounce of my summer, a tiny portion of the extreme highs and lows I’m bouncing through. It has taught me one thing so far, though. People say that life is all these things—it’s not like a box of chocolates, it’s not like a romantic movie where the people who’ve been searching for each other their whole lives find one another in a fruit market. It’s nothing like the things people say it is, because it’s completely and utterly indescribable. I could use all the descriptions, metaphors, adjectives my mind could conger up, but nothing puts into words how beautiful, overwhelming, entertaining and wildly exasperating it is to live.
This is just the beginning.

For me, it was always you.

It’s a simple concept, and people have struggled with it for centuries. The concept of loving, letting go. How exactly do we let something go? Do we ever, or does it sit with us forever? I picture love resting on the shelves of our hearts waiting to be used again like an old book, something you read before. A classic, one that you don’t think you could really read again until one rainy Sunday you rediscover how it took you to an entirely different world when you needed it most.

For me, this was always you.

I have these dreams about us where we’re living in New York, you a struggling actor and me an aspiring writer. Everyday, waking up, becoming our dreams. Our cozy one room studio in Brooklyn overlooks a busy avenue where kids of every color run home from a public school down the street on the weekdays and a market down the block sells fresh fruit. Miles Davis plays the soulful background music to our evenings while I do the dishes and you catch up on the Times. We fall asleep to the sound of cars passing by and the TV flickering, wrapped up in one another. We laugh more than we worry though our bank accounts are dwindling; our love for each other and the city overwhelm us so much so that we don’t care. We live a perfect dream of what we’ve always wanted, and attend art showings and dancing with each other in the dark on drunken Friday nights. You eventually catch a break on an audition for an off-Broadway show. We live a dream. This is what I believe in, what keeps my heart beating day to day. And who knows where we’ll really end up, but I could fall asleep happy every night no matter where I was, as long as it was next to you.

For me, this was always us.

I met you one sticky summer Saturday night in the beginning of my college years. And here I am, coming to the end and still just as in love with you as the day we met. We were crazy about each other in a way that was different than anything we’ve ever experienced. You left me love notes in my bedroom. You kissed me with more passion than I’ve ever known in a taxi cab as we sped down the street in Chicago on a freezing winter weekend. You brought me to life every time you made me laugh. You are seldom brought up. You’re the unspoken hurt that rests itself in my lungs, and I can feel you when I inhale early in the morning before I open my eyes. It’s a compulsion, the way I feel about you. Isn’t that what love is? It is confrontational, the sheer audacity of love. It hits you like a thousand pounds of steel and it is bold, it is truthful, it is good in the worst way. It is hurtful. I am well aware that our break up was probably one of the messiest in the history of tragic lovers. We were a Shakespeare classic. And if I could, I’d do it all again, just to feel the heat of the fight. Now it’s cold between us, a space that’s empty like an abandoned junkyard. So much there, nothing that anyone really wants.

For me, this is reality. And you’re sitting upon the shelf of my heart, a book that will collect dust until someone else moves in.

I am swept away by the breeze of a sweet violin, a smooth rhythm of the piano keys. I envision soft fingers atop the stark white keys. My body sways to the movement of the strings and I am taken back to the prelude. I listen closely as I imagine the composer raising his arms in a crescendo and everything is intensified, sounding romantic, natural. My eyelids embrace a break from the sunlight and flutter along with the sound. I feel your hand graze mine suddenly and we are dancing under the soft light shining through the window. A candle flame bounces light off the wall but without these, it is dark. Your hands are moist with nervousness but I know that it is not because you do not want to be here. I want you to pull me in closer, and you do, just as expected. I can feel the energy seeping from your pores as your body heat wavers in sync with my own. The music is quiet now, a background static. You are close to me, and my bare feet stick to the cold linoleum tile underneath. I laugh with an outward breath and you dip me far down, your hand a steady force upon my back, just barely touching my skin. My laughter is a canon in this room but I cannot help myself for the sheer fact that everything I have ever needed is right in front of me, so obvious as though I’d never seen it all before. We progress to the living room where I cannot help myself and I begin to kiss you right back and there is a trill in my heart between what’s right and wrong. I choose right, even if it is wrong. The music continues in a thick melody and the harmonies underneath the lines kiss my ears through a sweet song and I let it all go. It is so right. Chills run up and down my spine like the scales and every key plays the right note, every time. I am lost in a world of notes, of heat, of romantic composition that I feel inside my soul. This is the music people dream of, the type of feeling others reach their whole lives for. One song, one resonating feeling, and one complete opera that brings the audience to tears of understanding. I open my eyes and I cry tears of understanding to the finale, the last few bars of this sensational music. It was a perfect masterpiece of notes, all waiting to find each other at the right moment.

What is a good woman?

            Our whole lives, we’ve been told a million different things a “good woman” is supposed to be. As little girls, we’re told that we’re princesses; that we have the world at our fingertips. We dream of castles and prince charming and getting a pony for every birthday party. And no one tells us this is wrong. In fact, most people encourage little girls to believe this. As teenage girls, we’re told that we need to be skinny. We need to be toned and fit. As a good teenage woman, you need good grades, a class act football captain boyfriend and a cute, convertible car to match. When we don’t achieve all that our peers, parents and the internet alike tell us not to worry, for there is always college (pending you are accepted to the university of everyone else’s liking). As college age women, there’s a lot more expected of us. Women my age must be professional, ready for anything, working full time and piling an 18 credit course load on top of it all. To add one more layer, we’re expected to have manicured nails and groomed eyebrows similar to Kate Middleton’s. Even if it means staying up until 4 am the night before an exam to perfect yourself. We finally graduate and move on to being a grown up in our early 20’s, yet the struggle is not over. A man must be found and made a husband of, and you, the ideal housewife. An unused degree hangs on the wall somewhere downstairs, lost in the midst of you pushing out a few kids and maintaining your sanity in the process.

            In short, society has planned out for us what a good woman consists of. What if, though, after we go to a mediocre college, major in what WE want instead of what our parents push us to do, and proudly accept a degree after years of hard work, we’re not the perfect housewife? And we don’t automatically go on autopilot on this path of perfect womanhood? Ah, but there’s the key word here: society wants us to be PERFECT women. Not good women. And trust me, there’s a huge difference.

            We’re not perfect women. As hard as we try, we’ll never be perfect women. Stay up praying as many nights as you’d like, but it won’t happen. To be a good woman, though, that’s something within our reach.

            What defines a good woman?

You see, you don’t need a 4.0 GPA and a set of perfectly manicured nails. You can still wish for a pony for your birthday, but you’re more likely to get a decent bottle of wine and a couple cards in the mail. Be satisfied with this. Even better is that you’ve got some people to celebrate that birthday with. You’ve got a college degree, or you’re skilled in a trade. Or you’re really great at whatever it is you do. Be grateful for this. A good woman can be defined not by what she does, but more so by how thankful she is for her surroundings. A good woman isn’t one who attends church every week because she feels obligated. A good woman is one who makes it count when she DOES make it to church. One who when she prays, she means it. And a good woman prays even when the weather is good, not just when it’s raining on her.

The definition of a good woman can be a multitude of things. She is the one her friends know they can count on. The one who is fashionably on time. She comes in the form of a scholar, a leader, a thinker, a writer. A mother, a sister, an in-law. The shape a good woman takes may even be the one sleeping on the street tonight, hungry because she gave whatever food she had to her also hungry child. She sacrifices for others, because she is not the most important person in her own life. She is the addict who woke up in a crack house, dying to get out. She is the prostitute who knows her life has gone astray. A good woman knows a good struggle. She is empathetic, sympathetic, magnetic. Good women are the ones others idolize for the small feats. They attract others to them, but are too humble to admit they have phenomenal characteristics.

A good woman is someone inside all of us. Whether the good woman inside is aching to be seen or shines through you like a sunny day, there IS one in there. We are all good women. Let it shine.

[Note: This is an entry from May 3, 2011.]

Here I sit, with the coffee jitters, just passing 2 am on finals week. I always seem to write my best when it’s a few hours from daylight, sitting up on a study break. Here I am again, with one more year of college tucked under my belt. 4 years….4 whole years I’ve been in this city, what I once thought was a god-forsaken, pitiful town. Now this small suburb is what I call my home. I’ve moved 13 different times, in and out of dorms, in and out of apartments. All in different places surrounding this beautiful campus. I’ve met thousands of people, quite literally…the count on my Facebook friends list will tell you I’m getting up there. Everywhere I go, I see both new and familiar faces. 4 years ago, had you told me that I’d experience so many beautiful opportunities, gain this many unbreakable friendships and even cry tears of happiness at some points, I’d have told you that was absurd. Yet here I sit in a familiar coffee shop with faces I see on a weekly basis and couldn’t describe my life without. Taking in the smell of the fresh spring air and the hearty taste of my bold coffee. I walk these streets and breathe in these moments. I have been on a journey for the past 4 years, and I am slowly but surely coming to the end of it. I am not ready, so thank goodness I have one more year left here. My experiences with people I have met at Central are my foundation to the core. Before this, I was a shaky, irritable, often shy (yes…at one point, I was shy) little girl who didn’t know a thing about what direction I was supposed to be headed. And then, like a whirlwind, I was uprooted from my only sense of familiarity and re-planted like a baby seedling into the dirt of Mt. Pleasant. All it took was a little nurturing, but eventually, I grew. I don’t have deep roots here, but they’re still existent. My biological family doesn’t live here, but there’s people I would take a bullet for at any given moment who live only blocks away from me. It’s amazing what a little shake-up to your world can do to scare you. I never believed I’d find comfort in a place so far away from the home I grew up in as a child, but I find it here in every sense of the word.

This past year I seemed to have lost that comfort, temporarily. I’m not sure if it was the death, the breakup, the deployment or the fire that sparked my depression, or all four combined. I dealt with it for a while, but day after day my heart grew tired of waking up to the dull grayness that my world began to encompass and accept. Yes, I learned a lot about myself. Yes, I learned a lot about the people around me. But what did I learn about the harsh reality of the world? Well, it certainly doesn’t change and the world continues to revolve when you feel most like you wish it would stop for just a moment. What I didn’t know months ago what I know now, though, is that the world won’t stop, but the important part is what you learn about yourself and the people surrounding you.

I am a selfish person. I came out of the womb demanded to be held and since that moment the world has revolved solely around me in my own head. This all changed early in the summer, when I met someone who’s world revolved solely around themselves. It struck me like a bad chord and I was strangely attracted to it yet in the end, hurt the most from it. I spent months convincing myself that the hurt I experienced from his selfishness was okay. The other day, I read a private journal entry I had written in the fall. The page jumped out at me when I read what I had wrote… “I know he doesn’t mean the hurtful things he says to me, so it’s okay. He says he loves me so I know he doesn’t mean them.” I wished at that point, after reading it, I could slap myself in the face with all the might I could muster. Who was this person writing this? Surely it wasn’t me….this is not the Victoria MY world revolves around. But it was. For just an instant, it was the Victoria who revolved herself around his world. The lesson I received from this slap in the face? It’s fine for his world to revolve around him, and it’s fine for my world to revolve around me, but they should revolve in unison. Two planets, co-existing in the same universe, surrounded by the same stars and the same moon with equal rays of sun beaming down upon them. This is how two people should live, and love…for themselves and their own purposes, yes. But always spinning the same way as the other. It took me a simple two lines to realize this. It’s amazing what hindsight can do for a person.

The fire was a whole different story. Easily the most humbling event that has ever occurred in my life, I lost the only thing I’d ever really called my own, and that was my car. I watched this piece of metal evolve into flames and could only picture all the memories. Turning 16, earning my license and learning how to drive for the first time on the freeway in that car. Putting my “Central Michigan University” sticker on the rear windshield the summer before my freshman year. Almost getting into a car accident on the Van Dyke freeway during an ice storm with 3 other people in the car. Smoking cigarettes parked in the back lot at CLHS. Driving to my last day of high school with paint covering my windows. The memories are endless, and for some reason, I had never realized how many memories I associate with items. The first moments I saw flames burst from my hood all of my teenage years came rushing back like a waterfall. Where was I supposed to store these memories if not in the place where they all occurred, if not in the car that drove me so many miles to where they were? It truly hurt my heart like nothing has in my life. I’m not sure how to describe it, really. It probably sounds silly in a way to those who have never lost something so valuable or so dear to them in such a quick, hurtful way. Though the fire was small and contained by the roaring firetrucks, the damage I saw in the sunlight the next day proved a striking moment for me. Burn marks across the hood, smoke damage inside the car. What if I had been locked inside there, a malfunction due to the manual locks? What if I the flames were bigger and had hit the gas line? A million thoughts enclosed my mind. It seems dramatic, I realize this. I cried more tears for the loss of my car than I did for the loss of my childhood dog. This is an exception, though. This was the one and only thing in my entire life that caused me to realize was that items are so, so very temporary. Surely I had associated so many beautiful memories with it, but the car was gone. I was not. My memories were not. Whoa. That’s something, eh? What a lesson the universe threw at me with that one.

The deployment was one of the worst factors. Especially after that fight, the hour of screaming on the phone in the second week of August. It was hateful and deceitful and I had never known him to be like that. I was jealous and spiteful at what I thought he’d become. But when he packed his bags and left in the middle of a very ordinary day, I knew my heart would never be the same. We had been through thick and thin together, quite literally. There were nights where we hid under the covers, scared to come out for what we might find—monsters or boogie men or mostly an angry mother returning from work. And before he left, I had decided that I couldn’t live with myself if something happened and hateful words were the last I’d ever said. Like true brother and sister, we were fine after a short 5 minute conversation that had been waiting months to be said. Even after, though, I still regret the words I lashed at him like a whip. It’s hard knowing your best friend and confidant is consistently in danger. If I think about it too much, it makes me a little stir crazy and I have to grab some fresh air before the tears well up. I’m doing okay, especially considering the amount we really do get to talk. There will not be a night I will rest easy until he returns home safely with his feet on solid, in-state ground. There is not a day I don’t pray for him at least one time. There is not a moment where he isn’t close to my heart, even thousands and thousands of miles away. I wish I could hug him. I am simply glad that I have a person who shares the same DNA, though, that still inhales the same air on the planet as me…oh, and the fact that we can Facebook chat whenever we want.

I’ve written so much about the death that I’m not sure I could write any more. After I wrote his eulogy, I found myself at a complete creative standstill. I had been sucked dry of anything I had left. All I had to say were sad things, words that had no meaning. Words that echoed emptiness into the walls of my files and onto the pages of my journal and wished I could simply keep them shut so they wouldn’t slip out. “I know she will make it as a writer.”  His words swim around in my head every time I try and spit out something that doesn’t sound like nonsense. My problem consisted of something easily fixable, though. The words I wrote, I was writing for someone else. The things I said were put out there for other people to read. If not for a beautiful person in my life, I wouldn’t be writing to this day. She told me that I had to stop writing for other people. “Who cares if other people don’t like what you have to say?” she said. “Don’t write for them, write for yourself. If other people like it, even better.” What genius things that sculpted in my head. I began to see the things that my fingers whipped out in a whole new light. Who cares if other people don’t like what I have to say? I don’t write to please others. I write to let out the very inner sense of who I am, the small amounts of my soul I can manage to put into words. I write to feel my emotions in a way I can’t describe to anyone else. I use these keys and this ink to fashion my insides into a mold. Sometimes it comes out as mud, and some days it turns out to form a beautiful sculpture. I am fine with either. Even mud can be dried and turned into bricks.

All these things combined caused a sort of hurt in my soul, but when I look back with a clear heart and a little optimism, I see that they have made me so much better. How could I love without having experienced a broken heart? Every crack in my foundation builds character. It can turn a little shaky, but if necessary, they can be fixed with hard work and the knowledge to do so. Every inch of heartache I experienced this year clouded my vision slightly. Thankfully, the rain has cleared and I sleep every night knowing that if I were to never wake up and breath another morning, I wouldn’t feel as though my life was incomplete. How blessed am I to even have these experiences? To have the doors opened not only for great opportunities but for heartache, as well. They say there is a calm before the storm, but I have come to realize that the calm arrives only after the thunder has shaken you to the core. To have a grateful heart, you must know what it means to be grateful. To be grateful, you must lose everything. I lost all the things I thought meant something to me, and they showed up to be so much more. But here I stand, making a meal from my crumbs.

My life is one big, silly, cliché metaphor, and here I am…. just rolling with the punches.

What can you do in 365 days?

That’s one whole year.

12 months, 52 weeks. Almost 9,000 hours. Over 525,000 minutes.

And every single time one of those 525,000 minutes passes, you won’t get it back. Isn’t that a little bit scary? I mean, every single second you’re breathing is another one you won’t get back. Have you made every second count?

365 days ago, my life took a turn. I thought I had it made- an a fun job waitressing at a place I really enjoyed working at. Good friends. My 21^st birthday had just passed and I survived (to many people’s dismay). Summertime was peaking it’s head out and it was ready to arrive in full. I was on my way to having a phenomenal weekend up north with my best friend. And as I was sitting in Discount Tire, waiting for the man in red to make sure I wasn’t going to bust a tire on my way to Mt. Pleasant, I got a phone call that would change my life.

Two weeks later I was on my way to permanently live back at school. I couldn’t deal emotionally with the world around me, so I chose to ignore it. I ended up blocking out everything for the rest of the year. Up until very recently, I was content doing nothing. Sliding by, making an attempt at the very least in school, and pretending I was floating on a cloud when I was really somewhat dead inside.

I’d like to say I’ve been through a lot, but I know that comparatively I have been through very little. In a world of a 22 year old college senior, though, I’ve been to hell and back.

But here I stand, breathing. I have struggled with my body image since I was a little girl. My self esteem has been a roller coaster. For years I didn’t know what I want from life, so I pretended the very minimum was satisfactory.

But that’s okay.

We’re supposed to struggle as teenagers, as young adults, to find who we are in life and discover what we live for. We are supposed to climb this mountain with our bare hands, awaiting the top to find out what a good person is supposed to be.

I have climbed this mountain many times. And every time I got to the top, it felt empty. Until one day I looked down and saw how far up I was. Scary, right? ….Yet, in the best way. The kind of way that makes your heart race. It’s never scary until you look down and see God’s ground beneath you, like you’re hovering in the sky and you might fall at any moment. So you convince yourself to not look down. Your eyes stay forward, entranced by the view in front of you. All those things beneath you, well, they make you want to throw up sometimes. We must remember, though, that not forgetting what’s beneath you is what makes your heart stabilize.

This is what defines us as a member of the human race. A journey that is so intense, we must soak in every second. To fully enjoy what’s in front of us, we must remember the grueling pain of the battle we fought to make it to the top. And although we may have many more mountains to climb in the future, staying focused on what’s in front of you and remembering how you got there is the most crucial part.

So, fellow readers: I encourage you. Take this minute, take this hour, this day…even this entire week. Figure out what you need to do to keep climbing. Because the view from the top is spectacular.