love, life, faith.

With the exception of a few extra-special souls, none of us can see into the future. We don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. But barring some major interruption, we can still at least plan for tomorrow with some reasonable expectation of it happening the way in which we’ve planned.

But – sometimes, there is an unexpected, unfortunate “major interruption.” You know, like falling off a third story balcony and taking an 8-month break from your “normal” daily life. Sometimes life throws a curve ball that smacks you directly in the face, knocks you on your ass and leaves you on the bench for an inning or more. If you do find yourself alone and in pain on the bench, the trick becomes how you deal with watching the game from the sidelines when you’d rather be playing.

…

My friend Stephanie was sitting pretty in her life in San Francisco; working at Yahoo, planning trips to New York, dating, loving, laughing, living. Then almost two years ago, out of nowhere, everything changed.

She casually mentioned one night that she was seeing floaters in her right eye and a black crescent moon shape on the bottom of her vision, so she was going to go get it checked out. Turned out her retina was detaching, and would detach 5 more times over a year until finally stabilizing, leaving her with 20/5,000 vision (aka – blind) in that eye.

Her left eye is now showing signs of weakness and she’s facing a potential future that none of us can say out-loud. The overall message from her doctors is – “we’re not sure why this is happening or what you can do to stop it from continuing.”

Over the course of the past two years, I’ve seen my beautiful friend deal with a level of fear and depression you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. She wakes up every morning to the sunlight coming through her window, not knowing if she will see that light tomorrow. She hugs her nieces goodbye not knowing if that’s the last time she’ll see their faces. But through it all, she’s held on to the faith that she can get through this challenge that the Universe seems to think she needs. She has good days and bad but more-often-than-not, she rises to the challenge and refuses to let the fear of a sightless future prevent her from soaking up the sunlight and beauty in front of her.

She got a tattoo to remind herself of the choice she gets to make…. chose love, face life, and have faith that it’s all going to be OK, no matter how hard..or dark.. it gets.

…

Today and everyday, we should all be SO grateful for our eye sight. Nothing in this life is certain. You don’t know what tomorrow will look like, or even if you’ll be able to see it. Go outside and look at something beautiful and feel a deep sense of gratitude for the gift you continue to be given. Have faith that no matter what tomorrow looks like – you can chose to see something beautiful, with your eyes or just with your heart.