Balloons

Day 44

I was going to tack this on to the previous post, but I decided it deserved one of its own. My business partner has some very good friends who lost their son recently. Dwaine was a remarkable person from what I have learned. He was severely mentally handicapped and from birth he was left at the hospital for dead. This woman, a nurse, took him in. She and her husband adopted him and raised him. He lived to be sixteen and brought joy to countless people.

One of his greatest loves was balloons, purple ones to be exact. So, at his memorial service, hundreds of balloons were released in his honor. Last week I was designing the "Thank You" cards that his family would send to people who attended the service. On the front of the cards is an illustration of purple balloons floating into the sky. After I drew the illustration, I realized some things about balloons.

You can't push, pull, throw, or launch them into the sky. In order for them to fly, you need only to stop holding them back. Once you let go and release the balloons, they do what they were created to do - fly. As I continue to struggle through this recovery, one day at a day time, I will think often about those balloons and realize that worrying is like trying to push balloons into flight. The magic only happens when we let go.