I want...OUT!

...the only way out, is through!!


I woke up this morning thinking about the challenges I have faced in the last ten years. As I prepared my decaf Chai Tea, I considered my response to every storm that has come in the last 120 months: death, loss, pain, betrayal, financial tornadoes...
I decided to take inventory because I was concerned about my progress; I wondered if I had grown at all. I wondered whether I was responding to every storm in the same way. I asked myself if I was avoiding the storms again...
Unlike the physical storms that Mother Nature orchestrates, the "storms of growth" cannot be avoided. For those who feel they have successfully avoided them, they become repetitive patterns in their lives until the lessons are learned...
The "storms of growth," I have found, must not only be faced head on, they must be traversed through. Last year, the Gulf Coast experienced Hurricane Ike and the constant word by our local metereologists was to "hunker down" once the storm hit. Again, being a storm whose maestro was Mother Nature, this makes perfect sense.
However, for "storms of growth," the only way out of them is through. I was speechless as I thought about how the only way I would grow ("survive") after the storm was to go through it - not try to drive around it, fly over it, or burrow underneath it...
Did this comfort me? Not really. I just realized that I cannot avoid the highway leading to my growth and improvement. As one friend said, "the highway to heaven is in the desert." I don't know what your "heaven" is, but I can assure you, my friend, that the only way for you to get there is through - not under, through, or over...
What storm(s) are you avoiding?

(c) 2009, Dr. Kozhi Sidney Makai. No part of this blog post may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system without the written consent of the copyright holder.