Lessons in Life

December 8, 2009

Tom writes:

I’ve made several mistakes in my twenty seven years on this earth but none stand out to me as much as the mistake I made when I was thirteen.  I was living with my father, in Newfoundland, at the time and the people who I considered friends were starting to pick on me and outcast me from the group.  I didn’t know how to handle the constant abuse they were putting me through and as a result began to become very hard on myself.  I think it was at this point in my life that I stopped seeing the world as a beautiful place and began to only see the cruelty that the world has to offer.  Things at home weren’t much better either, with a military father who expects a lot out of his only son, pressures were high and my desire to just hang out with my friends and have fun was looked down upon to say the least.  What I wanted to do and what my father wanted me to do were two very different things and seeing that he was the man of the household I had no other choice but to see things his way.  So, most of my time was spent in the woods with my father, when I wasn’t in school being picked on of course.

He was trying to teach me how to be an outdoorsman.  He taught me to hunt, fish, chop wood, track, and most of all work.  The only problem was I wanted to be hanging out with my friends who constantly picked on me, craving their acceptance.  Eventually not being accepted by the people I so yearned to be accepted by and having different desires than my father had for me became too much to bear.  So I decided to move to Nova Scotia with my mom and leave all my problems in Newfoundland where they belonged.  This was my biggest mistake.  I say this not because living with my mom was difficult or anything but because in that moment in time I learned to run away from my problems.  I learned that when situations become too much for me to handle I could very easily run from them and this gave birth to a whole list of other problems that still, to this day affect my life.  If there’s a valuable lesson to be learned from my whole ordeal it’s that, running from your problems doesn’t  make them go away it just makes them worse because not facing the obstacles that life throws at you just makes it that much harder to deal with the much larger obstacles that life presents further along the path of life.  Wherever you go there you are, and just because you decided to run away from your problems doesn’t mean your problems decided to run away from you.