Show of hands, who has made it through their lives without making any mistakes?  Yeah, that’s about what I thought.

We humans are flawed creatures.  The best we can hope for is to minimize our mistakes, keep the damage to a minimum and hopefully be able to correct the damage, unless we are so narcissistic or sociopathic to believe that we are blameless and it’s always ‘someone else’s problem’.

I’m currently dealing with one of those situations which we euphemistically describe as our “chickens have come home to roost”.  After forty years, that’s a lot of chickens.  Those things breed like…chickens.  No, I won’t share the details, as that isn’t the point of this posting.   Suffice to say, if all goes well, it will be a good thing.  If it doesn’t, then nothing really changes, too much at least.  It’s been the single biggest regret in my life, and while I wish I could have made different choices at the time, I still stand by the choices I made then.  It really was an impossible choice, given the circumstances at the time.  My regrets are more along the lines of the effects it has had on the people involved.  That is what I hope to correct, forty years down the road.   I knew that this would surface at some point again, and it seems to have done so, at probably the most appropriate point it could have.  I guess only time will tell, and perhaps the lesson from all of this is…patience.  The long term type of patience.  The exact type I’ve never been very good at.  Ta-daaaahhh!

If life weren’t so dam comical I’d forget to laugh now and then.

Fortunately, I’ve had some excellent guidance through this episode though which I have been remarkably unobjective.  I will not mention his name because I didn’t ask permission of him and I don’t wish to embarrass him in any case.  But you know who you are and I’m not sure if I could have navigated this particular mine field without your assistance and guidance.  Thank you.

I have no idea where this thing will end up, but I have reason to believe, by the way things have unfolded of late, that it won’t be a total disaster.  At least not yet.  There is of course, still a chance that I will step on my…um, make a misstep but I hope not.  We’re all working without a map and without a net so it’s a little scary.  But I remain hopeful.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to write about it all later.

What’s my point?  Don’t be afraid of the past.  We’ve all done things we’re not proud of.  There’s always time to at least try to make things right again.  So try.  You never know what you can gain from it.  Oh yes, one more person to thank, and you know who you are.  Thank you for coming out of the past to reach out to me and make this all happen.  I hope we can make the best of this, and it’s nice to know that we’re on the same page.