Surviving the Detours

Regardless of how cautiously we plan out our route and watch out for potholes, life will always throw in a few painful detours. Your body can betray you. Your loved ones can walk away. Your mind can begin to forget. At any time, your careful designs can crash into unfair and painful realities.

In those times, just surviving can consume all of your energy; grasping that tiny strand of hope as you stumble through the dark toward a revised life that you didn’t necessarily choose.

These are the moments that test your character. It is when you are at your worst that your choices are most impactful.

Excerpt from “When I Died”

By Emma Lou Thayne

So if I now am at a distance

and more and more

connected to night

and wake up with a closed smile

that takes up my wrinkles

it is that I am occupied:

by the light that tells me

where I have been and will go and

listens with me in the ringing

and rejoicing of having had the time.

 

Emma Lou Thayne is a respected Utah author. This poem was published in Things Happen: Poems of Survival, one of her many uplifting and insightful books.

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