“Lasting Onward” – “enduring or able to endure over a long period of time” + “in a continuing forward direction; ahead”.
Last New Year’s Eve, as I do every year, I had high hopes for the upcoming new year. Same goals, same dreams, same hopes as I have had for the last five years; continued excitement that those goals, dreams and hopes have been a guiding light to keep me focused and inspired. I knew that I was likely to face the inevitable challenges that we all face, but was cautiously optimistic that my years of facing any major setbacks would be on pause. As it often does, the universe had alternate plans for me. New challenges meant new setbacks, new anxieties meant new methods of dealing with new emotions; missed opportunities to reach goals were met with frustration, a tinge of anger, and at times an unsettling sadness.
An old friend recently told me, “you’ve been through a lot, Sam, give yourself some grace.”
The truth is, it has been a lot.
In a matter of five months, I had endured a series of events that left me questioning everything from my faith, to my sanity, to my ability to plan for the future. There were many days I didn’t know if I should laugh or if I should cry, on many days I did both. In March, I broke my ankle and subsequently had to have surgery, followed the next month with a series of seizures resulting from a brain hemorrhage. In May, I had a craniotomy to remove the nearly three centimeter mass that was no longer silently sitting in my right temporal lobe, followed by my sweet grandfather passing away just three weeks later. The beginning of June marked his funeral, and on July 11th, my dear friend Getchen died unexpectedly, leaving many of us in shock and learning how to manage the grief of losing a friend for the first time. There was no time to recover from any one of these events, as each one was followed by something worse than the first.
For those five months, I was finding the need to take time away from the pressure of goal setting, and instead time to just “be”. Time to give myself the grace to allow my body to heal, and my heart to heal. With that time, slowly came the clarity of being able to stop viewing the last year as time wasted of not reaching goals, and instead view it as time to soak in continued growth in how I approach not only my wellness journey, but future inevitable events.
As I sit here on the last day of 2022, I no longer feel the disappointment of another year passing by. Instead, my focus is on all that I have overcome. For the last six years, and more specifically, the last year, life has been “lasting onward”, leading me in a continued forward direction. There have been challenges, losses, and struggles, but finding the clarity to give myself the grace and the time to simply be, has allowed me to keep moving while also choosing a path that has allowed healing to begin.
My hope for 2023 is that we all carry a little bit of grace in our hearts, with the same fire in our souls to continue to pursue our goals, our dreams. To treat ourselves with the same kindness we give others and to grant ourselves the opportunity to accept that it is okay to not always be okay. To see that through all the struggles, we also find growth and newfound strengths. And to always believe that we each have so many beautiful chapters ahead of us, just waiting to be written.
Sometimes our lives aren’t always going to be upward, but we always have the ability to be onward.
Love, peace, and happiness in 2023, and always.