What does it mean to be a soldier?
Last night I ran into a friend at a surprise 50th birthday party.
A friend who… somehow… I feel very close to… even though we don’t know each other very well.
My friend lost her young sweet son just a few years ago. I know his face… I can picture it right now… his beautiful blond hair… blue eyes… the kind of face you see in picture frames … the ones you have to pull out and replace with your own pics. That kind of face…
A tragedy that I can’t imagine.
And we shared the most amazingly beautiful moment during the party.
No one can imagine suffering through a tragedy…. unless they have to suffer through it. How do you do it everyone asks us???? And then they follow it up by, “I could never do it.”
And to that we both say BULLSHIT!
You want to know how you do it…YOU JUST DO… You don’t have a choice. And we toasted last night to that very sentence.
We toasted to our damn strength and perseverance… our sadness… our losses… our new lives…
How do we do it….because we just do…. there’s no other choice.
So, to all my soldiers… whether your in the military… or in the hospital… (I consider them both similar battlegrounds)… you’re now a soldier. And soldiering on isn’t a choice… it’s just what you do.
But… you have a choice in how you do it. So dig down… dig deep… and find the voice that says get up… and soldier on.
And eventually… you’ll be toasting to your own strength! How do I know…
Because YOU JUST DO!
Love,
Tra