Is it all relative?

The reason most of my posts appear in the late afternoon? Roger spends most afternoons outside, and I have 'free' time. 

I love my husband, and I like him as well. He tends to be quiet, not to be taken as being uninformed or unintelligent. He will talk in 'spits and spurts' though, here around the house. Often about something that he has been mulling over for some time. Earlier today, seemingly out of nowhere, he began to share an incident from his past, and suggested I blog about 'dark years' and how people can get through them by doing the right thing.

A dark year for him was 1982. He suffered a series of setbacks, details not important. He worked through things, and the experience left a deep impression on him.

He had a friend when he was young who committed suicide, and at the funeral the minister said something to the effect that no matter how bad you think things are right now, odds are in a year it will have evened out in the overall scheme of your life. Roger paid heed to this, and operates in the larger picture of life mindset. He will say, "What was so bad a year ago today that it is burned indelibly in your memory?" I get what he is saying.

Perspective is always better when there is something to measure against. We all have dark times. They may be hours, days, weeks long. The really dark times can last months. Roger had a year of darkness. 1982.

His take away? Pushing things off to the side does not make them go away, they still have to be addressed and resolved. No matter how bad it looks now, in the end life has a way of achieving balance.

You know what? That husband of mine is pretty darn wise.

It is all relative.

As far back as my teenage years I bemoaned the advent of February. To me it was like the sludge field of the year. Grey. Dank. Dead. Depressing. Drizzly foggy days followed by long chilly nights. Naked trees, mud puddles, dead grass. I left my beloved mountains to live in sunny Florida after a particularly difficult winter, and an abysmal February. My daughter was born in February of 1985, and I would not see her again for 25 years. There were years that I would lie in bed, weep in despair, waiting for the agony that was ironically the shortest calendar month to end.

I gave up, ceded to the despair and depression for years.

I started to heal slowly, spent my last bad February in 2001 starring at Lake Ontario and finding me again. In April I came home to southwest Virginia and my beloved Appalachian Mountains. 

I see the sense in and truth behind what Roger says because I lived in a cycle of despair that I had to work through. And life does balance out. 

A year ago my mother had a fall in her home, and for a time we thought the worst. Time and grace healed and imbued perspective. She is much more limited now, and my sister bears the weight of most of her care. Life has gone on. 

It is all relative. And how life is faced, and lived, is inextricably tied to our relatives. This can be bad, more often it can be good. 

When you have that day or week or month or year of darkness, and look back upon it, the light that brought the balance? That is the blood and chosen relatives you have surrounded yourself with. 

It is all relative.