A new year, a new President, a new job – and yet I call this the year of the circle. I’m working for the same company I worked for 8 years ago, walking home to an apartment back on the same block I lived at then. Only this time, it’s my boyfriend’s apartment and not the one my husband and I shared. 8 years ago and now my life has returned to a place on the circle where I’m repeating some footsteps.

I’ve always thought life sends you the lessons you’re destined to learn over and over again . Some people call that dumb luck, I call that personal defiance. Sometimes the controlling breed of people, like myself, aren’t easily accepting of the things we can’t change. We can’t predict what may happen. There are no guarantees in life, no un-do’s, no backspaces. It’s a final sale every day of our lives and for those that realize that, we take each day damn seriously.

2009 was supposed to be about letting it go a little bit. Leaving some of the worry behind. I’m still struggling daily. I still look for signs that validate my decisions; I search for someone else to give me impossible assurances. I look for a refund policy where one doesn’t exist.

But I’m I’m trying to move to a simpler way of thinking.

I know that it’s hard to change the essence of the way a person’s mind works (lobotomy, shock treatments, and happy pills excluded). I’ve thought deeply and often about life since I was 6 years old. I started contemplated death seriously when I was 10. It wasn’t graphic or dark; it was the simple realization of life’s fragility.

Today I got one of my Kabbalah Tune Ups and it hit the mark:

Life appears complicated, but it’s not. We complicate our own lives. We create chaos out of order. We mess things up, continually making matters worse because we just don’t understand what life is about or how it works.
The first thing we need to understand is that life is as simple as darkness and Light. I am not speaking metaphorically when I say Light. Only two things exist in this world: darkness and Light. Life appears complicated because darkness has a nearly endless variety of shades, and Light comes in countless colors.