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While I am not one to hunt out dark times and sink into them, I have come to see that darkness really can illuminate life in the end.

After some bad things happen, its almost the safest thing to do to proclaim that this misery will never happen again. You know what I mean. You can make really interesting decisions based on darkness.  “I’m never going to fall in love again, ” is the soundest decision to make after “love” shatters your sense of self, right?  Or, “I’m never going to take a crazy risk with my career after this disaster.  I’m going to do everything right from here on out.”

Or some version of that self-protective, seemingly wise stuff we tell ourselves because its just stupid to repeat the past.  Right?

But… you can’t live without risks, without love or without the dark as well as the light.

Fairy tales- and people’s very romanticized tellings of their life stories- suggest that at one point, if you are lucky, everything will be happy ever after.

This is not true. And I am so glad its not true.

Have you ever tried to get stronger by just barely doing the minimum amount of exercise to avoid all strain? I call it the Hollywood workout. A pile of magazines, wearing makeup on a treadmill, not breaking a sweat… but you are working out, right?

Yet you never seem to get stronger….

I love that this is puzzling to so many people. Its a huge conundrum of life, especially a stuck life.

I am not advocating suffering.  I am a big advocate of looking back and seeing the past for what it was, not how it got reinvented in your mind to create a sense of safety after things went bad.

The very darkest times I can reacall were where life pivoted for me. I bet for you, too.

Sometimes that shift took you to places you never thought possible, really opening up possibility.

Sometimes the flash-flood of pain took you far away from life and shut doors that might be still shut in your life.

What can you un-decide that you decided sometime in the past to avoid bad things from happening? How does that decision to avoid possible bad stuff affect your life today… still…? 

Big questions.  But the kind of questions that can set you free.

If you are curious about this, HERE’s a little feng shui for all of you very wise people who want to avoid all bad things happening.

Maybe risks are safer than the safety you have decided on? The great thing about today is that you can decide anything you want, fresh, all over again.

xoxo Dana