"Blog 106 - Celebrate With Me"

"A clear and innocent conscience fears nothing" - Elizabeth I

As I was looking at my blog "With a Conscience" today, I suddenly realized that this will be blog number 106.  I have written 105 posts and it feels like it was just yesterday when I began to write simply as a way of appealing to people's sense of decency regardless of ethnicity, religion, or financial means.  Look at where we all are today.

I have been writing this blog for eleven years.  I had only been married a little more than a year. I had roughly two years of teaching under my belt and they were the hardest years I have ever experienced.  See, a good marriage and an effective teaching career are built on communication and flexibility.  I was terrible at both.  Little did I realize that among all of the mistakes I was making in those years, I was actually thriving.  I was surprisingly growing up.  When you teach middle school, when you teach teenagers, you realize that you don't have all the answers to life.  You only have your own experiences to guide you.  You walk into a marriage or the classroom with a certain belief system.  Yours.  What you come to realize is that not everyone has the same belief system as you do nor will they...EVER.  I had to change if I was going to find peace with any of the decisions I had made.  As it turns out, that was a foolish endeavor as well.  You change not to accommodate anyone else.  You change because you know deep down that it's in your best interests to do so.  

At 59, I have the means and freedom to accept or change the situations that come my way.  I can, and you can, live with the knowledge that not everyone has to look at the world the way you do.  We develop our beliefs from our upbringing and our past decisions.  No one is immune from heartache, disappointment, loss, joy, anger, happiness, and passion.  We maintain our balance by looking within ourselves and not to anyone else.  THAT is by far the hardest lesson that there is to learn.  We can choose to carry hurt, anger and disappointment or see the joy that's right in front of us.  This is our choice.

106 posts.  106 different ways have been published to share the ride I have been on since I found the courage to write and express what I see is happening in the world around me.  It's become even more interesting when our world has grown smaller with our confinement.  "Our sheltering in place" has become a mantra for looking at what is right in front of us with more truth, more honesty and more emotion.  My hope is that we become better.  My hope that we learn how to communicate more effectively for our own health and well-being and also so that others appreciate where we are and where we need to go from here.  

Let us proceed "with a conscience."  Let us move forward and embrace what we have lost and look forward to what's ahead of us...with a conscience.