Riding with Destiny by Jayne Lyn Stahl

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Paperback

Would it be considered naive or delusional to suggest that sometimes "bad" things that happen to one can be transformed alchemically into something good?

When life deals you a bad hand, do you just throw in your cards and walk away from the table, or do you step outside to look for the north star, then come back? There is something to be learned even from the gravest adversity.

Having been prescribed bed rest for the entire Labor Day weekend was, for me, tantamount to torture, but it provided me the opportunity to unnpack my head of all the baggage I've been carrying around, mostly other people's demands, needs, and expectations. Being remanded to rest for 72 hours provided me with the luxury of much-needed meditation, if you'll pardon the expression, on where I'm going, what I want, and most of all where I want to be. What do I want to do with the rest of my life? Yes, these kinds of thoughts are a luxury.

We fill our lives with so much distraction: shopping, cinema, television, politics, pointless conversation, bombarding ourselves with newsreel footage of oil leaks, everyone else's personal tragedies but our own. We spend our time playing with friends on social networking sites, doing everything but confronting the haunting reality, as poet James Dickey suggested that we are wasting our lives.

Some have bcome so adept at carrying other people's baggage that they don't even need a doorman. Others will try to convince you that the baggage you are carrying is your own, but it's not. They bought it hook, line, and sinker, and only they can pay for it.

One longs for awakening in a world that worships sleep. Oh, and what an awakening it is to dream of stained glass, flying over the Atlantic, finding one's way in a foreign country, only to awake to headlines about Sharron Angle, Newt Gingrich, and Afghan civilians killed for protesting "mosque" protest in New York. I have been known, like many, to lose myself in headlines, and in other people's news.

So, an accident, and a temporary suspension of higher order thinking helped me to clear the cobwebs out of my vision, and to see, roundly and clearly, just how important it is to drive with the road in sight. Where this journey will take me, I honestly can't say, but movement has been the only divinity I've known, and what was an accident renewed a sense of purpose that was lost in the noise of car alarms, fire engines, and endless chatter of all types

Only those who refuse to answer when destiny knocks have wasted their lives.