LESSONS FROM 2009

"Live each season as it passes, breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each." Henry David Thoreau

This was one hell of a year! I am proud to report that all of the key things had planned to do are off my check list. Totally proud of me.
I didn’t think it would happen but it all did go down well.

Most importantly I have learned a number of life lessons this year. Let me share some of them.

Treatment Fatigue.
I have learned that no matter how good you are at keeping rules and regulations handed down by the doctor, that sometimes after one has lived with this virus for a while, made visits to the clinic, taken their Septrin, used a condom every time they have sex and all the other long list of Do’s and don’ts that we get handed down by the doctors. One can get tired of it all.
Yeah, I got tired of being HIV positive this year. I missed my clinic for most of the year and no matter how much the social worker at the hospital called me to go in for a meeting, I just didn’t.
Well, after a well deserved break; I am back to clinic, with a doctor I like. Took my CD4 test before my birthday as promised and the results? 753. My doc thinks I need to be tested again to check if I have the virus he he he.

God’s Angels.
Forget the drawings of white people in white robes and wings you saw in your Sunday school. Angels aren’t somewhere flying around in heaven singing “Haleluya”.
Angels are right here, in everyday life. Every year my sis Debs and i make a point of counting how many Angels God sends us.
This year I have so many the list is crazy. From people who I met a week prior to my resignation from my old job and who lined up jobs for me to do enabling me to make through to my next job, from friends who made calls when I was going through a certain breakup in February; to friends who offered physical, emotional and sometimes financial help when I needed it, to a special friend who showed me in every practical way that I don’t have to hang out in a bar with a guy to have fun.
This year, these angels have touched my life in so many ways and in a big way, changed it. I am a different person. And I am falling in love with this new me.

Any woman can be any woman’s friend.
I know this sounds cheesy but it’s true. Well at the beginning of this year, I was in the middle of counseling some girl who was getting a lot of stress from some man in her life. The moment she mentions his name and where he works I find out it’s the guy I was seeing.
I went into complete shock. This was worse than Shiko of Easy Fm, busting her own boyfriend sometime last year. Well, I didn’t know what to say, she was stressed to tears. I couldn’t add to her stress. I recovered from the shock to hear the part of her story where she paid the guy lots of money to be in the relationship.
On a serious note that hit hard. I couldn’t believe that a man I liked, who took care of me so well had to get paid for ‘it’.

Well, you can call me whatever you want, strong, insane, weird….. whatever you like but I decided to help this woman get her self esteem. I mean why the hell would she pay up for love or sex or whatever? As we speak, we are best of friends. We talk everyday, I count her as one of the angels I met this year.
I wonder what would have happened if I had gone wild and started a fight. Hmmm i wonder!!

Faith can move mountains.
At the beginning of this year, top on my checklist was the fact that I needed to get out of my old job. It wasn’t giving me any of the growth I wanted anymore. I wanted something new, something better.
Most of my friends kept telling me to look for another job before I quit. I for a moment there I believed that was the best thing to do. Well things back at work moved from bad to worse and one morning I woke up, went to the office, cleared my desk and came home. I took a step of faith, I didn’t know where I was going to or what I was going to do but I left anyway.
Looking back, this is the best decision I made this year. A day later I was off to Mombasa for my first assignment as a consultant, 4 months later I got my new job. You can be whatever you want to be, you just have to have faith and take the step.
Martin Luther King Jnr once said, “You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
Trust me, you will get there.

Gratitude gets you more.
You will not get anywhere complaining or being stressed about something or everything. If for every 10 minutes you take a whole minute to be grateful for just one thing that you have or has happened then your attitude about life would change. You would be more cheerful and fun to be around, then people would want to be around you and before you know it, everything will be going well for you. Be grateful for life; be grateful for family and friends around you , be grateful for the food you eat, for your job, for even the smallest thing like getting to work on time because believe me, somewhere not far from you, someone doesn’t have what you have. That is what makes life worth living.
This is the best lesson to take into 2010.

To my friends and relatives new and old who have been with me through out the year; Thank you so much! To those of you that I haven’t met but keep writing me emails because this blog has an impact on you, Thank you too. You are the reason I keep writing. To those who read, learn something and try to be better people or educate someone, thank you as well, because then the chain of ‘good’ keeps getting longer.

Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones. Happy 2010 full of blessings and beauty!