Stealing Joy

If you are sitting in your livingroom watching the best movie on tv and eating the greatest banana split in the world and a stranger walks into your house, picks up your tv in one hand and grabs your banana split with the other before walking right back out of your house taking away your moment of bliss, moment of joy. Would you just sit there and let him or would you get up off the couch, grab the nearest weapon and beat the snot out of him to try to get your tv and banana split back.

Most people would chase after and fight back in this situation. Why is it then in our lives we allow not only strangers, but more often then not friends to walk into our lives and steal the joy from our lives, from our home or from our jobs/hobbies? Our lives are what we make of them and no one has the right to take that away. Most of the time we don't even realize the joy is being sucked out of a situation until we are too far gone and think that something is wrong with us. It can leave one extremely broken and bitter.

Once your joy is stolen, your world is never the same. You may strive to get back to the person you once knew, but you come out of it a different, changed person, even if it's ever so slight. A little less trusting, a little more resistant and you may not even be able to reach the same level of happiness you once knew. At this point the hard decision needs to be made to continue to pursue at a lower level of happiness or jump ship and find something untarnished to pursue being wary of those pursuing it with you.

Change is hard, but as humans we should always seek to grow more, know more and evolve. Without this we become stagnant and that might be worse than going through the change and evolution.

Firefighting and EMS has become this for me. I have known this for a couple years, but despite my attempts at leaving the field..I keep allowing myself to get sucked back into it like a junkie hoping that one more fix will make it all better. I am glad to have had the realization that I allowed someone to steal the joy I once found holding onto a hose or bouncing around in the back of a speeding ambulance, but I am still teetering on the edge of figuring out whether to stay and work with the pieces I have left or chock it all up to experience and shut the door on this portion of my existence.

For now I will stay on the current path, seems whenever I divert I get nudges that despite me wanting to be done.. it's not quite time to be done and that things will work out one way or another eventually but I need to have the patience to stick it out for right now.

Thought for the day: " Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive that is youier than you." Dr Seuss