To live our own life sounds easy enough. After all whose life would we live and by extension whose memories would we be making? Did you ever wonder if you were living a life that you weren’t called to live? Are you working the wrong job, dating the wrong person, or investing your energy into making memories that are void of purpose? Has anyone ever asked you if you are hanging on to a goal or an idea that society expects from you?

Living Your Own Life

If I am not living my life, whose life could I possibly be living? It’s a loaded question, but it’s a question that I was recently asked. I have a unique situation, a paradox that I have been living for quite some time. Strangely, I have found hope in my despair, healing in my brokenness, and joy in my sufferings. It all sounds noble, but it was not what I set out to do. I just wanted to write.

All I set out to do was to write things that made others think differently about what makes their world difficult while sharing with them what made my mine. Through some early morning musing and late-night ramblings, I have come to accept that the life that I had envisioned for my wife and my family is gone. But in many ways, I am still unsure what will replace it.

When I started my journey of living with Parkinson’s, the disease not the blog, it was just my wife and I. In the weeks and months that followed, we shared my news with close family and friends, and gradually with others on a need to know basis. Some would join in, while others would create distance. Eventually, when it became evident and it was something I could no longer hide, it became public knowledge via a sophisticated modern day adaption of the game Telephone.

Making My Own Memories

But this isn’t what I expected. I never anticipated that Parkinson’s would have an impact on my career or in my relationships with my wife and children the way that it has. I thought that PD could be minimized to an inconvenience, a barnacle on the bottom of my ship. Instead, it is now the navigator of the ship. What started out simply as a source of friction that slowed progress now has a seat that the table and is a factor in every noteworthy decision. How did this happen?

Not all memories that I am now creating will become bad memories. In fact, I think the opposite is true. There are more memories I will hold close with fondness than that will make me cringe. It’s these memories, newly captured pictures of a life that is full of purpose and promise, which keep me going.

Letting Go

I had to let go; I had to let go of what society expected of me. More importantly, I had to let go of what I expected of me. The person who once dreamed of moving mountains now has come to accept that it is simply his place to enjoy their majesty and spender and to bask in the presence of the One that spoke them into existence.

Greetings from Yosemite!