I am blessed to live in small city…near the center of the square. So I am able to wonder and to discover all manner of things in my little town.  

Today was one of those days…suffering from being confined to the four walls of my humble abode, I decided to take a walk to the “square”…..only a few blocks from my house it is a walk that I’ve taken countless times…sometimes to go for lunch at one of the quaint little restaurants we have, sometimes stopping in to look or purchase something from one of the chic little botiques around the square….my favorite place is the music store, either looking thru the window at the asssorted instruments or to look thru the self help music books for the Ukelele that I’m still learning to play….It’s a quaint little place that’s taken shape thru the years…

 Today, I stopped off at the Art Center….it’s a small building that used to occupy the Fire department…It was subdivided, part of it occupies the art center and the other half a sandwich shop. Convienet! Huh?  There is photo exhibit….a young man, Greg Davis traveled to India a couple of years ago and took some wonderful pictures of a gathering…the descriptions follows below.

“This exhibit provides a visual journey to India’s Kumbh Mela, where every twelve years at the confluence of the three holiest rivers, untold millions converge to pray, commune and ultimately…”  

Along with the photo’s there was a 20 minute video where he talked to several participants and documented the sea of humanity who gathered for this “spiritual experience”…. What caught my attention was one of the men he interviewed…”I live a life without tribulation” the gentleman softly spoke.  

Walking back home, I pondered on those words….’I live a life without tribulation”.  How is that possible I thought?  Latter on in the day, I posted that phrase up on my social network page and had a comment from a nephew… with a good question, a question I had asked myself…..”how is that suppose to be good, what would that makes us?” After all aren’t we defined by our struggels…by the things we have experienced in our lifes…the suffering, the joyful moments, our deepest and most profound moments of sadness, happiness….from the day we come into the world we are shapped by the things we experience…our envirorment…the things that happen….many of those things, sorrowful tribulations….

My life is void of tribulation!  Ah, I wish I could say that with a clear conscience….a heart that has never known heartbreake,  a life lived perfeclty…..I thought of my aging body and all the things that have happened to it…Maybe if I’d taken better care of it, some of these things wouldn’t have occured.  But, hell, if the rain hadn’t happend yesterday, I could have gone for a  walk….sometimes,, things happen that are beyone our control.  My life lived without tribulations!  Maybe I can think of all the things that have not happened, things that happened to other people….I’ve never lost a child…I’ve never lost a spouse…I’ve never up to this moment been diagnosed with some illness that carries a death sentence….Many thing that I know other people have experienced I have not.  So to some extent, my life has been lived without to much tribulations…or at least tribulations that I have never shared with anyone…or only a few people know.  Things that have made me, hopefully a better person…if not better, at least more aware and more compassionate…

Loving someone is a gift we gain alone the way…family, friends, children, if we are blessed, a spouse, a lover…even a vocation.  And even sometimes those things can be a tribulation.  Children who take a different road than you had planned or hoped….a spouse’s betrayal…a lovers betrayal…the lose of family thru death or family disagreements….so many things can upset our “normal little life.”  

My life is lived with countless tirbulations…but in some preverted way, i welcome those tibulations…it reminds me of my humanity…I am not invinsible…I’ve learned to be more careing…compassionate, giving, certainly more loving…I’m working on the forginvess thing….that’s really hard.  I don’t think I’ll ever have that down.  Maybe on day as family and friends gather around my grave and they remmber me, they might say, she lived a good life….right now I’m just trying to make it thru tomorrow….

Photo by Greg Davis….