Sabbatical 4

Today, I am in New Jersey, the state where I grew up, married  (my first husband), gave birth to my two sons, and lived until moving to Miami in 1972.  For the previous year, my ex-husband had wanted to move to Florida but I did not want to leave all that was familiar to me including my family. However after the worst winter of my life, I agreed.  We moved to West Palm Beach and I was miserable.  I had two young children and lived in a retirement community and it rained every day (it was June).

I would cry and wonder why I had ever made such a foolish move.  We finally moved to Miami and although life did improve – the sun came out, I found friends my own age – it was the beginning of a long downhill fall for me emotionally, physically, and mentally.

I realized this morning while walking Willow how life is a journey.  We travel along and think we know the path we should take.  Eventually we come to a fork in the road.  Although at times it may seem like we took the wrong one, if we stay on, keeping moving forward, learning and growing we usually wind up in the right place.

I love the movie “Sliding Doors”, in which is about a woman and the path her life takes when in one scenario she misses her train to work and in another makes it.  It shows her life as it becomes in both scenarios and it is indicative of how a decision can make a major difference in our life, sometimes seeming to be for the worse yet  how it  seems in the long run to work out for our good and to put us where we were meant to be.

I do not have any strong feeling regarding predestination or if our lives are based on the decisions we make.  I believe it is a combination of both.  I do know that I am so happy and grateful that one day long ago, I made the decision to make a major change, do what I what afraid to do and move to Florida.  That decision was the one that put me on the path that has taken me to this moment – and it is a moment in my life, that I realize I took the right fork in the road of my life.