The hardest thing to do in this world is to walk along a path that has no certain future.  Along that path we stop occasionally to sleep or to remember how we got there.

As we flip through the mental photographs of the past, emotions somehow seem to be stirred up inside of us like a bottle of rustling bees.  Those emotions have no consistency.  They have no direction.  They have no real purpose, but we place much weight on them.

The path often has its traps to pull us to the side and stay a little longer.  The trees are pretty; the flowers are always blooming like it is a warm spring day.  If we decide to stay, do we create a new path?

I believe that there are snares or tempest if you will.  I have fallen to the curse of the tempest many times.  Each time I fall a little bit deeper into the luscious forest.  Each time I find that the forest seems to grow behind me even thicker than it was before.  The path is still there.  But now it lay behind the brush.  I have to find a new path, one that leads me back to where I belong.  I have failed more times than not.

When I was born, there was a path already started for me.  Some children have a path that lay before them that is a little bit brighter and a little bit wider and a little bit longer.  I was not that child.  I was a child that had to start making decisions earlier.  I had to man up to my faults and admit my defeats at a much younger age.  Until this day, I have not realized how difficult the journey is without that direction.

Does the blame sit at the door steps of my roots?  Or does the blame wait in my life’s mailbox that I never seem to check?  I can not change the past.  I can not change the future.  The only thing I can do is to make the best decisions now.

So as I journey on this path, hopefully it is the best one, the one that I first set out on; Lord knows that I have made so many mistakes that just to get back is a journey itself, I start to make the right choices, the ones that will turn on the candlelight lamp to its most powerful setting so it can illuminate my path to the very end of time.

Patrick Hite

Sunday, August 23, 2009