Looking Back

I attempt to live everyday looking forward. It’s been my way for as long as I can remember. Much too often I’ve seen those around me fall time after time because their attention is focused on what’s behind them. So what I’m about to say might seem out of character and counter productive. But sometimes when you’re so focuses on the “horizon” it’s hard to see where you are. Sometime it’s important to look back to see how far you’ve come, or maybe to see that you’ve gone nowhere at all and you’ve been going in circles all along.

So today I was thinking back… [It’s a Friday night. I’ve had a long long week. We’re trying to stay above water at the job and Boss Man and I have been treading water all week trying to stir up some business… while I was cooking listening to Salsa, releasing the weeks pressures, I got to thinking w/one Margarita under my belt.]… Thinking back five or six years…

It’s almost incomprehensible when you compare my life now and then. To think how back then my family was such a big part of my life. In many ways they were the MOST important thing in my life. They were part of my every weekend, my daily thoughts and my nightly worries. A family crisis was just a train ride away. Don’t get me wrong I love you my family dearly. But I no longer feel like I’m holding my breath anticipating the next thing. Still I think… I miss… I wonder… but never in a million years would I have believed that one day I would be 100’s of miles ways living my life. A life where I primarily worry about me and my husband. I'm not trying to find a way to fix this one or rescue that one. On the other hand, no escape from my own personal hard times to my Tia’s and mom. No place to run and hide. It’s come to be a, “face it head on” “find your own way” kind of life. It’s quite liberating although at time lonely with all of my favorite people so far away.

I have to tell you Friday nights are always the hardest. More often then not I was on an E train on my way into Queens, to laugh with the ladies or chill on the stairs with the guys. To have drinks with Marisol or Dancing in my living room with family. Now on my drive home on Fridays I pass on my normal News Radio for the Hip Hop station or a good Salsa CD. It makes me feel just a bit closer to home.

As I look back at who I was then I am stunned at how completely different it all is. Looking back now I see how far I’ve come not so much in the progress sense [most of that is just stuff, material things], but in the personal, ME, life altering way. I think back at my relationships then. Relationships I would have staked my life on, now no longer exist, friendships I would have never dreamed of flourished, things I thought would always matter no longer do, and sometimes I look around and wonder how I’ve come to this place or how it is that I never saw the truths I see today.

I look around and find I’m in a place were things are not perfect but I can’t think of any place else I’d rather be. In a place where the small things in life are wonderfully amazing and surprisingly fulfilling. I look around and see that I don’t need perfect, I just need peaceful. That the truest people in my life with time showed themselves in ways I would have never thought. And above all as I look back the one thing that made the most difference is truth and honesty, truth and honestly within myself. Once I found that I no longer needed to hold on to the past, the honesty of that freed me to move into my future. I don’t regret these changes the same way I don’t regret the past. [… moving on to Margarita #3 Happy Friday!!!]