When people start burning bridges in your wake, your brain starts to play tricks on you. When you find yourself trying to claw back up the burning planks, splinters under your finger nails, you can’t help but feel weak and awkward, like the weight is too much to keep fighting for. That arsonist turned on you, jumped into the icy blue, fleeing away from you.

You look down. There it is, that swirling cesspool, licking at your toes. You think people want you to fall, to jump, to join them there in the sea of bitter, of burned out, of broken. You know your reputation is tarnished already, what with the way you can’t even fix a friendship, help another to see your heart. You are a joke. You feel chopped down, diminished, small. You feel helpless and betrayed and worst of all your very sense of self corrupts, you’ve let too much of your identity exist in the mind of another.

You feel it, don’t you? The waterfalls forming in your eyes, old wounds made new, healing weaknesses exposed, insecurities rebirthed.

And you want to join you in the bitter torrents. You want to wish the worst for them. To wish bad luck on them, to make them a cartoon or a secondary storyline in your own story. You want to succumb to the dark water beneath, let all your wounds fester and grow, to breed and spread to other relationships, to build up higher fences, stronger boundaries. But you can’t. I won’t.

Because the truth is, when we reach that distant shore, and the sea of our lives has tossed us and we are again reduced to fine dust. When we crawl back up into that sand and we lay there panting,  I actually hope you will still indict me for my foolish hope, my senseless joy, the idiocy of my unconditional love, my irrational peace. The way I laugh at the days to come, how insane is that?

I’m not just living for some far off kingdom, some far-and-away from now. No.  Today I am choosing the heights, depths and breadth of my life…To always choose joy over bitterness, hope over dispair, peace over war. May every day be the best day for you too.