To my son Tommy,
There will be days like the one I had, where everything seems against you and you feel like you are floundering and lost for hope. Nothing makes sense and you believe the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming locomotive. You will feel under-trained, under-equipped, under-prepared, underwater. Somewhere in you, the depressive side of your manic-depressive Irish blood will try to grab you and hold you down. Do not believe it or fall for it. It is only an illusion.
You will wake up in the morning, the sun will shine again, the world will not have ended and you will try again. Treat every morning like a clean slate. Do your best to let your worry and fret go at night and then let the dawn refresh you mentally and spiritually. Pray for the strength to make the new day better than the last and have faith it will be.
I am extremely lucky to have at least two of those moments every day. One, when I wake up like above and one when I come home to my loving wife and son. It allows me that ever necessary moment of forgetting what ails me. It is a bucket of cold water to wash the sweat of despair from my face.
Don't fall into the martyr syndrome, the "woe is me" attitude. And definitely don't follow in my poor example from my younger years and make your troubles disappear into the bottom of a whisky bottle. Liquor only distorts your hopelessness, it doesn't make it go away. Remember you are still on the right side of the sod (rather than 6 feet under) and though you may feel like you are going through hell alone, you are never alone.
So tonight, right now, to get rid of this funk, I am going to go hug my wife, lay a solitary kiss on you, my sleeping son, say a prayer and sing myself to sleep with a little Marley tune called "Three Little Birds". And the sun will rise again tomorrow.
Sincerely with love from your dad,
Leo
No comments:
Post a Comment