It’s time to write this all down. In truth, I don’t regret anything. I don’t choose to live with the fear of not respecting my choices in the future. I choose to learn from them and live with them because they were rooted in love and passion and not in fear. The mistake made at 100% is never a mistake. It’s a commitment that turned south. But the bottling of the aftermath leads to sleepless nights and nightmares.

I have woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking about what happened. The shaking of my hands. My heart racing. The shiver up my spine.

No emotion is foreign to me. What once filled a place in my heart now seems void. It may be gone, it may be present, but as it stands right now – it feels hollow and cold. The negative floats into my mind. I ponder the reasons for the pain delivered. I ask myself why. I think back to the past and try to understand. In many ways, I do understand. I remember in the beginning knowing I was dealing with lightning. Exciting, powerful, enchanting…lightning. But unharnessed lightning strikes randomly destroying life. And it did. Sharp to the heart.

And yet how can all of this pain coexist with the feeling of love. It baffles me. To lose someone, to be punished, yet at the same time care so much that the heart continues to sing despite its tears. How does it even happen? How can it possibly be that way?

They both exist. The extremes. Both sides can be present in the same soul and everything in between – and that creates, often times, a storm inside that rages until peace finds its way into the depths.

The past can be haunting. The future can be intimidating. The present can cause the sensation of drawing. But at the same time the opposites exist. A wisdom filled past. An exciting future. Being present in the now. But to take it even further, there are layers to the onion besides the core and the outside. There are so many possibilities of what can be true at the same time that other realities exist.

So to feel inside that I love and suffer at the same time, as unfortunately insane as it is, really does make sense.

There is no black and white.

There are only wonderful colors and shades in between the two opposite absolutes. And when you are ready to accept the fact that you can still care, fear, shake and celebrate something or another all at the same time…well, that’s when you truly grow. We are massively complicated people. Nobody is ever one thing. You cannot attribute a single word to someone and describe them. No, you must understand the complications of the “self.” No decision, no idea, no argument, no relationship, no anything really is as painfully simple as we would like it to be – primarily for the sake of our own understanding of it.

So where does that leave me? Respect. Respecting the intricacies of life. Fact is, good and bad things will happen to you throughout your time here. But in all honesty, even the bad is layered with some good and the good is layered with some bad. Nothing is truly pure. Light is comprised of darkness and darkness always has an element of light. When you can start to see how beautifully ridiculously complicated life is, then you can live in it easier. It’s when we try to simplify everything…that’s when the mess begins. Because it’s never that simple. It’s never that black and white.

I think what I am trying to say here is this: Be fair to yourself, be fair to situations, and be fair to others. Understand that feelings, decisions, and life in general is very complicated and don’t make decisions based on absolutes. Make decisions rooted in the goodness of your heart.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project