Taking what we have for-granted…

We all go through the same things in life, though each individual’s experience is different. When we experience something life changing, for instance; someone close to you passes away, or you struggle to get through something, only to lose what you were struggling so hard to keep. We don’t realize how very lucky we are, no matter how little or how much we may or may not have, until we lose it all, or come so close.

We all make bad decisions and are faced with the consequences, and we hate ourselves for making that choice, the moment we realize what we’ve done and don’t like what we see. So what do we do? We can’t go back, what’s done is done, but we can learn from it and try not to make the same mistake twice. Eventually, we will learn to think things all the way through before going ahead with whatever we were thinking.

I was 18 and had just gotten my drivers license, I didn’t have a car of my own yet so when I had the chance I used my dads van. On thanksgiving, after dinner my friend Melissa wanted to hang out so i borrowed my dads van and picked here up. We were pretty good kids, we weren’t drinking, breaking laws or doing drugs. WE just grabbed some ice cream and drove around the neighborhood listening to the radio. There was this long road that was pretty spooky at night because it was so empty, there were only one or two houses, a dock and some industrial buildings, but the further down it you went the less there was around. We decided to drive down to the end and turn around. We would turn the music off and try to scare eachother, one of my friends had called me when we were on our way back so I was talking to him on my cell phone. WE were coming up to this really sharp corner, like a 90 degree angle, you could hardly see if any cars were coming, even in daylight. Melissa and I were joking to my friend on the phone that we were going to “floor it” around the corner, I didnt hang up the phone and concentrate on driving and I didnt even think about what I was doing, i just pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor. I imediately lost control of the car and dropped my cell phone to try to steer the car away from the cars that were parked on the side of the road. I barely missed both cars and went off the road and into some short wooden pillars that surrounded the small parking lot. I broke right through the cable wire that held the pillars together, up-rooted two and dragged one across the parking lot and back up to the road, but not before missing a telephone pole by inches. Out of impulse to the fear, Melissa’s reaction was to put her feet up on the dash board, if we had hit the telephone pole she would be paralyized, if not dead.

We both were okay, but after this experience I learned my lesson about driving. I knew that it’s not a right, it’s a privilidge that comes with responsiblity and if you arent responsible and dont make good decisions, there are extreme consequences. We make mistakes, we’re human and it’s in our nature, but through the outcome and experiences of those mistakes, we learn from them and find value in what we have. We can’t be perfect, we will probably never stop making mistakes, but we can definately cut back on the amount of bad choices we make, by remembering these experiences and the lessons we learned from them. It shouldn’t take us a bad choice to be happy with the good choices we’ve made or the things we have and the people we love.

Everyone hears, “Don’t take anything forgranted”, and we shouldn’t, but it should be remembered all the time, not just when we screw up. We can smile before we can lie. Life is short, and we have all of our life to appreciate how blessed we are. It can take so many mistakes before we realize what we have, but it only takes one to lose it. Appriciate what you have before you make a mistake, not after, because the first mistake can lose it all, and when you smile you have it all.