One of my current goals centers around this little story that someone wise once told:
Picture your life as a glass of water, and the trauma that comes into it as salt.
If you take a spoonful of salt and stir it into that glass of water, it has a huge impact on it, and makes it nasty and undrinkable.
But if you take that same spoonful of salt and stir it into a clear mountain lake, it has virtually no effect at all.
We can't control the salt -- bad things ARE gonna come, it's just life.
But we can control the size of our vessel by becoming involved in much more than just the life of one person, or two people, to the point of obsession.
My current goal is to broaden my life, stretch it out wide with other things I love to do. I am going to school, I am volunteering here, I am working. I am teaching myself about gardening so I can grow some of our own food. I am teaching the little girl down the street how to train her new puppy. I am taking classes in how to identify the plants and animals around here. I take little cheap evening workshops on things that interest me - wine, dreams, goal-setting, yoga. I write down things that I might be interested in trying, and then I save up money to do them.
I am trying to become a big, big body of water so that virtually no amount of salt can make me feel toxic again. It is hard work sometimes, but it's how I want to live and die.
Wild & precious indeed!