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Jeffrey B Trollinger's avatar

This poem by Kaitlin Curtice popped up in my reflection from Richard Rohr this morning and it immediately took me back to this discussion.

Don’t forget,

my love,

to live.

Don’t forget

to bury

your toes in sand

and leave the car keys

and laugh at oddities.

Don’t forget to marvel

and feel despair,

to sense danger

and run from it.

Don’t forget

to take chances,

to climb mountains

that no one believed

you could climb.

Don’t forget

to love yourself,

all of you,

from every season

and every place,

because you never know

when they will

come knocking for

a cup of coffee

and an overdue hug.

Don’t forget

that you are alive

right now

until you won’t be,

and even then,

don’t forget

how beautiful

it was to

call yourself Home.

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Jeff Trollinger's avatar

As I reread this today a quote from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier comes to mind (my apologies to all you Star Wars fans out there!) Jim Kirk says, "Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!" There is some truth to this, but we can't dwell in it. We have to learn from it, take a nugget out of it, maybe carry a scar to remind us of it every so often, and move on. But it is in the loss, the pain, the disappointment, the clawing our way back that we learn who we are. Without loss, you can never die to your old self; you can never find your true self.

So if the image you peel from the mirror doesn't look like you, doesn't seem familiar, maybe you've forgotten how you got here. And if you have forgotten, go back to the bookshelf and pull down the love letters, the photographs, the desperate notes, (the journals from years past) and remember what you learned. Remember how you got that scar, that gray hair, that realization that you are stronger than you thought, more vulnerable than you probably care to be, more empathetic than you ever dreamed you could be and wiser than you have ever been.

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