child birth

Christian Piatt 4-11-2012
Photo by Reynardt/Shutterstock.com

Photo by Reynardt/Shutterstock.com

I was pretty sure my parents were insane when I was a kid. It never made any sense to me when they’d talk about how they’d rather have something bad happen to them instead of to me.

Well folks, that makes three of us, I guess. Being the good little narcissist, I agreed that I didn’t want anything to happen to me, damn the consequences to anyone else. We all go through that developmental stage; some grow out of it and others, not so much. It takes time, experience, wisdom and a broadening of perspective to understand that the avoidance of suffering, in itself, is not the end-game of life.

It’s even harder to understand suffering as a gift.

Vincent G. Harding 12-09-2008

I think it was sometime early in 2007 that I began to find myself almost possessed by a profound premonitory sense that the next year, this year, 2008, would be filled with a special power.