On my way home from my chiropractic appointment with my friend Darin Mazepa, from whose office I leave always feeling like I received a spiritual tune up along with an entrainment,  I was listening to the song by Lake Street Dive called Call Off Your Dogs. I have heard it a gazillion times, but today the line, “You got me wishing that I’d never said hello,” jumped out at me. It had me thinking about all of the people and experiences I have said hello to throughout my life. Some I am overwhelmingly grateful that I did and others, sometimes wished I hadn’t.

Then I wondered what my life would be like had they not walked into it. Even with emotional turmoil and challenges some carried with them, even with the ways that I was tested to be true to myself and my values, even with sleepless nights and anger storms that raged within me, since I rarely allowed them to flood people around me,  I want to live not to regret any of the hellos. Some were lovers, others friends and co-workers. One was with my husband of 12 years that brought with it all kinds of paradoxical interactions. I can clearly recall the moments when our various paths diverged and we were irreversibly plunged into each other’s lives. Eye contact. Hand shakes. Hugs. Words of greeting. In several cases, as I think back, I am reminded of my favorite line from Jerry Maguire (no, it’s not “Show me the money.”) It is “You had me at hello.”  Indeed some did. I smile wistfully at a few, and wonder how things got as messy or complicated as they eventually did. With a dabbling of these folks, I carry decades of memory scripted in my head as it would be in a journal. Some actually were documented in my journals; a few I have kept for more than 30 years. As I have read them, I shake my head at how far I have come in my thoughts about relationships and then there are times when I am in bewilderment that I STILL have some of those dysfunctional beliefs. 

As I began to re-write the stories in my head, which is challenging enough, let alone doing it while driving on busily traveled, 18 wheeler clogged PA Route 309 in the torrential rain, I saw a car pull in front of me with the license plate FND PAX (Find Peace) and of course I laughed at the synchronicity of it. When I simply allow life to be as it is, then I do find it. It was too rainy to take a picture of it, but I will call it into my awareness when I find myself regretting anything; whether they are hellos or goodbyes.