That’s probably the best way for me to start this off today. Here we are again, all the running around is over with and we’re back where we started. But are we really? Okay, the question really should be am I really? I don’t think that I am. Fourteen total hours on an airplane gives you a lot of time to do some soul-searching. I think I realized through all of this and this trip that we somehow got blessed with means that it is time to try to turn the page. I could say it’s time to try to be something else for things to change, but in a way, that’s not really the answer. Yes, things have to change, but in a way they have to go back as well.

The four days in Dublin I spent without using my braces were a milestone for me. Do I get around well? No, not really, but it’s not terrible either. My legs were sore and tired and my feet did hurt some, but it was nothing I couldn’t live with. And I guess that is the key to the whole thing now that I look back on it. I can LIVE with it. Part of me has been so caught up in what happened to me three years ago that it was becoming too much of what I am and was starting to identify me too much. I don’t want to just be identified in that way. I have a lot more to offer, and while I may not be able to do everything that I used to, I can still do many things. I already did the dying part and got beyond it. Now it’s time to start living again. So the braces are going away to the back of the closet, hopefully never to return, but we’ll see how it goes. I move slower without them, and a little more carefully, and rely on the cane a bit more, but I feel like I accomplished something by letting them go.

The trip to Dublin let me see that I wasn’t just depriving myself of opportunities, but I was doing it to Michelle as well, and that really wasn’t fair. She should be able to enjoy everything that life has to offer. Goodness she went through enough where she deserves that much. The trip showed that I can do some of the things, maybe at a much slower pace, but I still can do them. I have been too afraid for the last few years to try things I think more out of a fear of failure than anything else. I would get discouraged at small setbacks, and still do to some respect, and that is something I need to keep working on. One of many things actually.

I don’t think I will ever get beyond the frustration I still feel at the whole illness thing. Part of me still cannot handle the fact that there are months of my life that i do not remember at all and what I do remember was really just some alternate reality/dream/afterlife type of experience. I need to know more about that and I am not quite sure how to go about it but I will somehow and someway. For now I think I need to focus on the “now.” I have a beautiful wife and a great son and a lot of life left to live with them. So now I have to get myself in shape physically, mentally and emotionally. So that means diet and exercise to try to get myself back to where I need to be. It also means spending more time giving of myself to my family and friends, which I know I do not do enough of already and had kind of shied away from for the last few years. And it’s time for me to move on emotionally. I know I will still have doubts, and maybe I’ll have to deal with some depression now and then, but I think all of that is changing for the better now and I think once I get my health back to where it can be I will feel better about myself overall.

I’ll still write about everything I feel now and then. I have to; it’s really my only outlet for it, my only way to figure it all out. But I want that to be less of what I do and have my writing define me in other ways. And so since I am changing, naturally the blog has to change some too. I’ll be writing more about other things now. I want to do some writing about baseball now and then, which is a big passion of mine. I also love music (listening to it, not playing it) so we’ll do some stuff with that too. Movies are a big thing for me. I watch a lot of them so we’ll talk more about them. Books, let’s not forget about those. I love to read and we’ll be talking about stuff like that as well. Lest we not forget the creative writing either. I haven’t done much of lately since I was in my little funk, but I have been having some ideas come to and I am writing them down (I have notepads all over the house now), so I hope to do more of that as well. I’ll also be writing some more things about what’s happening in the world and bringing up some questions so we can all join in. I’ll let you know up front, I don’t talk politics with anyone. We get enough of that in our everyday lives, and everyone has their own view, which is the way it should be, so there’s no need for me to profess about mine. I’ll keep doing the questions every now and then, and I do still intend to ask questions to people on Twitter. I think that is a fun experiment and I do have more to say about that for another blog. The whole Twitter thing fascinates me.

So we have a lot of things to look forward to, and I guess that’s the other key too. Let’s LIVE and LOOK FORWARD and keep doing things that way. And so here we are, and here we’ll be. See you tomorrow for a fresh start.