Friday's Personal Journal: What Matters Most

So a surprise trip to the mainland has given me a bit of time to contemplate what really matters and what happens when dreams are shattered and the future seems so uncertain.  I came across a story that I'm going to share today since I have a bit of time sitting here in the hospital to type.  It is a great analogy of how to look at events in your life that significantly alter the path,  "Welcome to Holland" by Emily Pearl Kingsley.  When you are going to get married, it's like planning a fabulous vacation to Italy.  You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans...The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice...You may learn some handy phrases in Italian.  It's all very exciting.  After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives.  You pack your bags and off you go.  Several hours later, the plane lands.  The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?" you say, "what do you mean Holland?  I signed up for Italy.  All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."  But there has been a change in the flight plan.  They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.  The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease.

It's just a different place.  So, you must go out and buy new guidebooks.  And you must learn a whole new language.  And you will meet a whole new group of people you never would have met.  It's just a different place.  It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy.  But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around and you notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips and Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there.  And for the rest of your life, you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go.  That's what I had planned."

The pain of that will never, ever go away because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.  But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, lovely things about Holland.

Life is different now, no doubt.  But good still exists in it and my children are the absolute joy of my existance.  It hurts, but love for them will concur. And...I'm hoping that instead of Holland, the pilot makes a mistake and ends up in Fiji. 
Janet B