It’s 9:10 am.  I drop my kid off at school and breeze down the highway trying to decide where I want to eat breakfast.  My breakfast date is going to be an hour late or so.  I’m eat-my-hand hungry so I decide to segue to our newly regular bagel shop.  I dash off highway 277 at the N. Davidson exit and plan on making  a U and getting back on the highway.  Not so much.  I run into a line of disgruntled  commuters waiting on a the AM train.  They caught it, and not in a good way.

Instead of looping around and avoiding the sure to be 10 minute or so wait as the train idles through, I decided to sit. I put the car in park even, exhibiting a type of patience that’s becoming easier to as I get older.  Immediately my “gut” tells me to continue reading the chapter in Eat, Pray, Love that I’d been in this morning (I shan’t be judged for my literary choices.)  I do what my gut tells me, read the following, and promptly burst into tears in the line of disgruntled commuters:

“The Bhagavad Gita — that ancient Indian Yogic text — says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s perfection. So now I have started living my own life.  Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”  — Eat, Pray, Love the 30th bead.

Ever since I’ve decided to go to school, got accepted, and found out that my past financial follies were keeping me stateside for the moment, I’ve been looking at my life.  I’ve been examining and reexamining it as one does fruit before purchasing.  I looked at all the imperfections. I sueeze myself through introspection to find that I was, as my friend Shelly would put it, R.Y.P.E. (realizing my potential everyday). That’s pretty dope, because I’m now recognizing that many don’t and never will.

In the end if my writing career and my life mean anything to others I want it to be an example of how to live life fully and on its own terms measuring successes with one’s own yard stick.  It may not be a perfect life.  I may never stop falling for the wrong men or get myself together financially, but I’ll never stop trying all while living the best life I know how; the one I have.

Salud!

Rosie.