Strength by fire

“You choose to go voluntarily into the fire. The blaze might destroy you. But if you survive, every blow of the hammer will serve to shape your being. Every drop of water wrung from you will temper and strengthen your soul.” ~Margaret Weis

I believe this.
I believe that everything that happens – every thing – enables us to grow into stronger, more complete and balanced people. The joyful things in life keep us sane, feed our spirits – they’re the sun we need to flower. The hard, painful things keep us on our toes, keep us from becoming stagnant, build our character and essential selves into the deep, multifaceted beings we’re meant to be – they’re the rain we need to grow.

Nothing can exist, much less grow, if it only gets sunshine.

The trick is to learn to deal with the painful, bad things. To use them to make yourself stronger instead of letting them beat you down. To learn from them instead of becoming a victim of the same bad things, over and over again.

Ever notice that the same people always seem to have the same problems, continually? I have a hard time understanding that. Do people thrive on pain and problems? The attention those problems gets them? How can you not learn from your life experiences? Not grow as a person, become stronger and better instead of rotting in the same place in life, perpetually suffering the same pains?

I think it’s partially an inability to admit we’ve made mistakes – or that, having makde mistakes we haven’t learned from them and it’s us, our choices and errors, that cause the bulk of our pain – that causes a lot of us to repeat the same pattern over and over. And to then blame it on the world instead of taking responsibility for our own lives, happiness, errors, whatever.

I have a hard time dealing with people like that. (You see it a lot in BDSM circles.) I find those who can’t learn from their past, from their mistakes and errors, from the blows life deals them to be incredibly weak. Sounds a little cruel, I know, but it’s how I feel. If the same man has dumped you six times and you go back for a seventh – it’s yer own fault, you should have learned, you should have grown and made a better choice at SOME point rather than continually making the one that’s going to end up hurting you yet again. Your own fault, your own weakness. I could cite a zillion examples…

I live my life knowing I’m making my own choices of my own free will — and that if those choices reach back and bite me in the ass it’s my own fault for having made them. I may not always choose the “right” thing but I always accept full blame for the mistakes — and I learn from them. I grow. I become a better, more mature, more complete, more aware person by doing so.

Not that I’m some sort of goddess of perfection. I’ll never claim that. But I accept, learn from and even embrace my faults — they make me who I am and, more than that, they pave the path to becoming better. Every time I step into the fire I come out stronger. And you’ll rarely see me step into the same fire twice.