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The air is cold now.  The beginning of another fall and winter season.  The fall has become the beginning of beginnings for me.  Has anyone ever asked you what your calender looks like in your head?  This question was posed to me when I was in 7th grade and I have thought about it ever single year since then.  I will give you an example.  I think of my calender like a clock.  January being at 12 o’clock.  The months moves counter-clockwise.  June appears at 9 o’clock and August at 6 o’clock and November at 3 o’clock.  6 o’clock is has been the beginning of many crucial points in my life due to the fact it has been when I began school every year.

In life, we find the hardest thing to do is to begin a task.  To initially get the ball rolling on any project is often quite challenging and then also to keep it actually rolling for a period of time before it can be on cruise control.  My biggest challenges and hardships came at 9 o’clock and into the 6 o’clock hours on my own mental calender.

In hindsight, these challenges and hardships have done so much to help me grow as a person, but had left so much devastation in the wake of my barrage of selfishness and self loathing.  I couldn’t see past my own nose.  Like being lost in a dark room trying to find the light switch for months on end and knocking over everything in the process.  We all want to grow up to be successful people who make wise decisions to benefit the world around us, but its the journey we take to be that person that verse us off and on the road.  We either become the road warrior or speed racer.

What I have focused on is my fight to keep my car on the road and be neither.  We often run our own people off the road.  People we love and who care even more about us. Their outstretched hand means nothing more than that of a thumb of a hitchhiker wanted for murder.  I was given lesson after lesson and had failed them all and lost two of the best people in the world.  I lived for so many months in search of their friendship again.  The amount of bad luck had nothing to do with it.  The endless pile of horse manure that you are buried alive under mattered not.  The lesson being taught was, could you recognize the important people in your life and what they were truly meant to you?

Life is too short to not give everyone a chance.  Even if it is their second, third, or twentieth shot.  In the end, we all deserve somebody to love and to share the best of times.  We all need our time to grow and it requires life altering events to get their.  I go back to my example of the road warrior.  It unfortunately takes us until we have flipped our car into a ditch in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness that we can truly see our life clearly.  Our life clicks into a clear perspective and we see not only did we really mess up our own lives now, but the damage that lies in our wake is exponentially greater.

I have seen and done things that I am not proud of and have let a lot of people down in the process, but it is how I will grow and mature that will make all the difference.  To myself and to all those that have suffered from my poor misjudgment.  I find it hard to truly hate someone unless that have personally hurt myself or my family.  I can find a place for everyone in my heart and I hope that with time that everyone else can as well.

- Tom