"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Soren Kierkegaard made the statement that I've used for today's title, but his comment isn't the only inspiration for today's post.  I've been talking with many friends and relatives about their troubles of late, encouraging them to have faith that life is going to work out for them eventually, and encouraging them to have patience.  It's a sentiment I've heard many times in my own life, and as I've been going about the business of being me today, I'm looking back at my own past and seeing how the times that were most trying in my life were the times that have put me where I am today....

I've spoken in a past blog about cancer and my father.  At the time that I was living through it, it was Hell on Earth.  When I returned to college after my loss, I was taking a Creative Writing class that encouraged me to tear the scabs off my still healing emotions, poke the wound and cause the feelings to bleed out, then describe them in meter and rhyme so that others could feel what I was feeling.

Without that class, I wouldn't have started writing poetry.

Years later, a friend's daughter saw my poems while she was babysitting, was moved to tears by some of the more pain-filled poems, and encouraged me to send a couple of them in to a new local paper's seasonal poetry contest.  The publisher of the local paper loved my work and encouraged me to do more.

Without that young woman's suggestion, I wouldn't have become a local celebrity known as "The Poet Lady".

My mother-in-law, who was quite put out that I had gained a status in town that made people forget that the only reason that I had moved there in the first place was because of HER son, made several snide remarks.  Her remarks, rather than discouraging me from continuing to write (which I would have done prior to losing my dad), made me write a short story and send it to a national magazine to try to prove her wrong.

Without her rude remark, I would have never had the courage to write such a steamy short story and send it in for publication - nor would I have been encouraged to continue writing.

At the time that I was writing poems and that short story, I was using an electric typewriter - which meant that any editing that I was doing on my finished work.  I had been reading about word processors and how much easier it was to edit things with their use, but we were poor and unable to even think about owning such a thing.  Then my husband picked up a side job that involved cleaning a furnace for a woman who complained that she needed something bigger than her little Datsun pickup to get her, her children and all their possessions to her home state, over 1,000 miles away, but she couldn't afford to rent a UHaul.  Since we were driving a full sized pickup in better repair than her truck, my husband did "a little horse trading", swapping our truck for her truck and her Tandy HX 1000 computer.  It wasn't internet capable and all documents had to be saved on floppy discs, since it only had 256 mb of memory, but it would suffice for what I wanted it for.

Without that chance meeting, I wouldn't have begun work on "Night of the Tiger".

Several years later, when the Tandy died and a friend gave us a Compac computer he'd put in his closet when he decided to upgrade to a newer computer, I had just been introduced to the internet.  I would come home from my job as a janitor, and if my husband was working late, I would feed the children and then go into a chat room to "play" with some new friends I had made.  I was also staying in touch with another friend via email and still working on "Night of the Tiger", but progress was slow and I still had several chapters to go in order to finish.

Then came November 11, 1997.  Veteran's Day.  A day that I still had to work, but was doing some chores for my janitorial job that weren't on the normal roster.  It would also be the last day of my pain-free existence.  When I awoke on November 12th and tried to get out of bed to start my day, I literally went to my knees, screaming in agony.  All the bending, heavy lifting and twisting involved in my job had caused a bulge in the disc between L5 and S1, and the bulge caused my vertebrae to move, which caused a pinch to my sciatic nerve, sending shooting pains from my back down to the tips of my toes.  I ended up being heavily drugged with pain killers and put under the strictest order to do "NO bending, NO lifting, NO twisting".  Always a very busy person, I was going nuts when a friend from the chat room suggested that I spend my time learning to program web pages.  To practice, I started publishing my poems online, and as I published the poems and started looking for more things to practice with, I turned again to my almost finished story - and completed it.

Sending the finished manuscript to publishing houses, I was disappointed to get rejection slips - or sometimes, just the unopened envelope with the words "We do not accept unagented material" even though their listing in the Writer's Market said they did.  A complaint to my friend via email produced a lead to a new company that was forming with a new way of publishing books:  Electronic books!

So, without the unexpected back injury and resultant restrictions, I would never have finished my first novel, nor would I have had it published.

I could go on about other things that have happened and the changes in direction that they caused in my life, but I suspect you see the point of this post now.  When I left high school, my dream was to become either an actress or to become a high school English teacher who could also encourage young actors by running the Drama Club.  Here I am, almost 35 years post graduation, doing neither, but with a new vocation that seems to suit me much better.  Each of the things I've chronicled above changed me, and the huge blocks that were the bane of my existence at the time that they were happening in my life became the building blocks for a new dream.  If someone had told me way back in 1979 that I would be a published writer, I would have laughed at them, yet here I am.....

Life is going to throw monkey wrenches at you.  Learn how to juggle with them.

Life is going to put blocks in your chosen path that you won't be able to just climb over.  Learn to do as a river does, changing the flow so that the block just becomes a place where you can take a rest while going back over your memories of your life and see how it changed you.

Life is going to give you bruises and painful scars that you will carry with you for either the short term or for the rest of your life.  Don't let you pain sideline you.  Get up, dust yourself off, and know that others have lived through this.  So will you.

And on the anniversary of such things as your last pain-free Veteran's Day, take a moment to thank the men and women who have pains that make yours look like paper cuts in comparison and reflect on where your life might have gone had such a thing never happened to you.....

Thank you, Veterans, for your service.  Without you, I wouldn't have the freedom to write this blog and post it on the internet........