Epiphany

Nearly three months since my last post and I am much, much farther ahead than I thought I could be.  I’ve dabbled in art and am currently working on a few pieces for a friend’s gallery. Although my work is quite amateur and I view it as a fun project rather than a means to any sort of monetary gain. My true focus since my last post has been about self-development through joy. Finding happiness amongst a sea of misunderstood thoughts is no easy feat. Surely I have work to do, but I know that bliss is a continuum. One must accept it and remember it in order to truly harness its power.

I’ll share my epiphany, but first I want to explain how it came to fruition. Honestly, there are many things and people who have aided in this discovery and listing all of them will surely interrupt my train of thought and possibly bore you, so I’ll keep the time lapse current. This week I had the honor of attending a live recording on Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) covering the topic: A Beautiful World, The Gift of Failure. A friend, and blog reader, invited me to the sold out show and it turned out to be the best gift and I have ever

received. A Beautiful World was a 90-minute pilot program performed in front of a live audience, “in a faced-paced, mixed-media format with storytellers and newsmakers adventuring and finding solutions in today’s complicated world” MPR. Guests of the show included Dessa, a very well known and respected spoken word artist and musician, and bestselling author Sarah Lewis, who discussed her recently published book: The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. Throughout this mixed-media exploration I kept hearing a familiar echo: failure isn’t the end, it’s a means to discovery.

What if all our failures are stones paving the way to our destiny? If you believe in destiny, as I do, you know that it’s not a destination but a home where everything comes together to create harmony. Harmony within ourselves that where we have been and where we are going are only as important as where we are now. After the MPR event I couldn’t put this to rest. Thoughts of my not so privileged life, law school, and the time I dedicated to the military have always felt as failures or lost love and hope. Yet when I think of what I learned from each undertaking the same thing keeps repeating, compassion and empathy. During each event I struggled because I felt so deeply that I let hurt over power love. I guess I always figured people are relatively wired the same way. We all have hope, faith, honor, compassion, courage, empathy, etc. While that might be so, we don’t all share the deep power of each, we feel some more powerful than others. I had so much hurt in my heart because of my intensely empathetic personality that I let it drive me. Why it’s taken me 33 years to figure this out is a thought I need to ignore. Accepting this as a freshly paved road is my epiphany.

As a child I had endless love and empathy in my heart but no place to grasp it from. I saw love in my dad and grandfathers heart, but the hate in my birth mothers subjugated any love around me. Striving to obtain a law degree pushed me into a dark place where all I saw was greed. I envisioned working in environmental law or family court where I could really make a difference in the world. Rather than learning the tools to help people, I saw sadness and a greedy overcast. I wasn’t able to see past the hurt people throw at each other to gain unnecessary commodities. The pride and sense of belonging I gained in the military became something out of a fairytale book after having gone to war. I was a stranger in a place I no longer belonged and felt shame and confusion where pride once was. The gift of my military career coming to an end was the awakening of my empathetic nature. I mean, it was my empathy that tore apart the seams of my military career. I was ostracized because of my PTSD, but also because of my strong empathic nature, which was strongly frowned upon in the military culture.

Each of these events revealed darkness and lured me to act in punitive ways.  While I’ve been on the road to overcome, I couldn’t see past it. The reason is the same as being unable to see past our failures. If we can’t find the good, we only see the bad. Throughout all this time I never reflected on “why” this all kept me from stepping out of the darkness or seeing past my failures. Now that I’ve dissected the “why” the picture is clear. I’ve felt like a stranger in my own mind because I let the pain of the world drive me. If we view our failures as a product of who we are, rather than as tools to see a clearer picture, we’ll be stuck. Understanding all this and being able to use it as a strategy to move forward is the key to it all. The epiphany is that I realized I was stuck in the darkness and now know the road ahead is filled with love and empathy. My experiences didn’t encourage my empathetic and compassionate nature, but they taught me to truly harness them as a definition of who I really am.

The past, present, and future have never felt so beautiful.