Open letter to a former lover

We ended our romantic relationship 15 years ago, but we stay in touch. He has been married for a dozen years now, has children, a high-pressure high-paying NYC job, inherited a butt-load of old Massachusetts family wealth--and is miserable. He emailed saying his problems must seem like nothing compared to my own. I responded with:

"If your shoes pinch or you have no shoes at all, your feet still hurt, don't they?" Suffering is suffering, and if I had my way, it would be eliminated from the spirit of every person on the planet. Imagine what we could accomplish as a species if we were not carrying around so much pain!?

Am I too impossibly positive? I am one of those people who can lose a sister, have another going through terminal illness, and nearly die herself, and still lay in a hospital bed and laugh at the absurdity of Life. The nurses and docs who took care of me just marveled at the positive energy that I put out, day after day, for 15 days of pain and needles and drugs.

I had a lot of time to think, laying in that bed, because I refused to numb my mind with TV. And laying there, I was reminded that I have no control over Life. I have no control over how I feel about what Life comes at me with. I only have control over what I think about it and how I act/respond to it. Thoughts and attitudes are causal forces in life. We create our lives, the circumstances of our lives. Have you heard of the quotation "As a man thinketh, so he is?" A few years ago, I finally got what it meant ;)

I know what it is to be happy, every day, to be happy more than I am not happy. I know what it is to be powerful in living my life, to be free and at peace, and to feel fully self-expressed, rather than bottled-up and repressed. I am responsible for my own happiness, and for the circumstances of my life, and when I made that realization, and put that realization to work for myself, my life transformed immediately. I choose happiness and freedom every day, every conscious moment. I choose health and fitness and vitality every conscious moment. I make these choices with varying degrees of success, but I am not discouraged, and I do not give up. I simply remind myself: Choose it. Be it. Do it. And then you will have it.

Life is beautiful, love. Its achingly, terribly, terrifyingly beautiful. It is short, transient, uncertain -- and that makes the beauty of it even more poignant. I hope you find what you need to be happy, even if we do not have the conversation on it that I hope to have some day. I'd love for you to know what it is to feel the way I feel every day -- but you have to choose it for yourself.