Runnin’

“When things seem most intense, you are closest to your victory.”

It’s an interesting theory.

How accurate it is remains to be seen.

Sometimes it seems like everything just keeps going wrong & then one action breaks you. You’re crying & crying & it seems like all is lost & everything turns around.

But in the moment, when all hope is gone & you’ve cried until you can’t breathe, you feel like there is no greater pain than this moment, the one where you feel so desolate and alone. You feel broken & confused & wonder why things are so horrible right now. Perhaps though, the theory is true. Perhaps the hurtful action is the last act of the desperate, determined to run what they can’t run from, so they have no choice but to lash out & inflict pain & suffering in order to feel validated in their choice to be unhappy. Those who lash out are often trying to hide and when they can’t, they have to dig further and deeper into a hole and make a bigger mess for themselves. They know they have done wrong, so they try to hide. Their hiding leads to inflicting further pain onto a person, even more than before. It becomes a vicious cycle in which one person continues to lash out at their harmless victim in the hopes of driving them farther and farther away, while the other stands sadly, bleeding and in pain, wondering what they could have done so wrong.

This is the moment where things change.

Either you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and continue on. You could pick yourself up, dust yourself off and wait for the intensity to die down and hope that the desperate’s last act was enough for them to realize they are hurting themselves as well as someone else and hope they turn around to repair their destruction. Or, you could lay down in defeat and live forever in your own misery. But either way, once the most intense part of the journey has come and gone, you are faced only with the prospect of victory or defeat. It’s up to you which path you take. There is the path of infinite forgiveness and love or the path of uncertainty. Truthfully, both paths are uncertain. Even the path of forgiveness isn’t really certain. Maybe you pushed too far, too hard this time. But you’ll never know until you admit that you were wrong. Sometimes, that is the strongest step of all. Admitting one was wrong.

So, perhaps we should take solace in the fact that the hardest part is over when adversity hits us so hard that we can’t breathe. After all, it can’t really get worse…or it can, you just don’t know it yet.