As the year comes to a close, I have to say I’m ready to let 2014 slip away and look forward to a brighter 2015.  This past year taught me a lot, perhaps more than many of the years that came before it.  I started 2014 in my own little world, in a time period in my life when everything seemed pretty amazing.  My loved ones were healthy, our travels incredible, our apartment lovely.  It felt like we were on top of the world, with everything working out pretty amazingly.  And then month by month about mid-way through the year things just sort of got complicated.  And for a few months there towards the end of the year, it sort of felt like nothing was going to swing our way.  Between months where everything seemed to break in our apartment, to travel issues galore, to my mom’s on-going battle with cancer, a family emergency after Christmas, my best friend’s father dying way too young and a few of my own health issues along the way, the end of 2014 wasn’t my greatest.

To be honest, it’s a case of a lot of different things happening in my personal life, things that are out of my control, things that have literally brought me to my knees, crying on the floor, things that very physically have tested me greatly.  I pride myself on being strong, on holding it all together when it’s falling apart around me and these past couple of months as 2014 has come to a close, have taught me that while strength is important, so is vulnerability, so are those moments when you are literally hanging by a thread.  It is in those moments that you truly know you’re alive, when you look around you and wonder how you can possibly have this much strength at all, how you can possibly still be standing when your world is breaking apart in front of your eyes.  When you hear someone you love crying, when you don’t know what the future holds, let alone the next few days, when someone you love is in pain, those moments when it seems like you can’t take any more, those are the moments of this life that we are at our purest, when we know there might only be a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel, but there is still light.

Life, I have learned all too well this year, will not always be wonderful.  Sometimes it is sad and tragic and heartbreaking and downright mean, sometimes it’s fragile and trying and gut-wrenching.  And we will all go through times in our lives when we feel these emotions, when we aren’t sure what to do next, when we are tested with each breath we take, but it is up to us what we learn from it and how we move forward.  For me, I know this trying period in my own life is not over yet and might be far from it, but while the light might seem so far away sometimes, there is indeed still light and we must never forget that, we must never stop fighting.

But years like this do happen to us all, years when you wonder how we’ve gone through months and months without really thinking, with nothing seems to swing your way, months when it seems like it’s just obstacle after obstacle.  2014 taught me a lot of lessons, lessons that I think I’ll carry with me always, lessons that seemed to alter the way I thought my life would be, the path I saw ahead and changed what really is important.  But ultimately 2014 taught me that we might encounter times in our life when not everything is good, when we are challenged beyond what we thought we could do but at the end of the day, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel, there is still light.