Sometimes we feel that we are being held back, but...

"154 people who like, Isabel Johnstone, haven't heard from you in a while. Write a post". This popped up in my notifications feed on Facebook recently. First of all, I'm very flattered that 154 people like my page. But I'm sure that they've not been sitting at home pining away because I haven't posted in a while.

My last blog was about persisting even if, or especially, when something happens to discourage you. I'm still feeling chuffed that my short story was short listed, but I've been too busy working on my Open University degree to get down to any creative writing. But I'm now on my Summer break, so no excuses. If I'm being honest, part of the reason that I've not been blogging much recently is that I felt that I'd lost my direction.

My blog is meant to be about proving that 'Life can still be an adventure', but for the past few months it's felt like anything but. I began to feel that I was a fraud, who'd fallen at the first hurdle, and was letting life drag me down.

When I first started blogging I used to get inspiration from photographs with captions that people shared on Facebook. Just recently I saw one that made me think that perhaps this past few months haven't been a step in the wrong direction after all. It was a photograph of an archer and the caption said something along the lines of, 'Sometimes we feel that we are being held back. But we're actually being pulled back in order to be launched into even greater things.'

I'm not sure about the 'greater things' part, but I believe the point is that sometimes we need to take a step back, be still for a bit and decide what our next target, or goal is. It would be lovely if life was all fun and adventures, but we all know it isn't. But we also know that we need life's challenges to help us to grow, become stronger, so that we can deal with the hard times, which are an inevitable part of life.

Life is full of surprises. In December of last year, we were told that our 17 year-old cat, Chutney, had a type of lung cancer and only had a month or two at the most, left to live. We were devastated. But decided to make the most of the time we had left with him. But 5 months later, he was still with us. We decided to take him for a check up. To cut a long story short, he doesn't have cancer after all. He has chronic bronchitis, but is still enjoying life. In fact, only last week I had to take him to the vet as he'd been fighting and had an abcess on his ear.

We could've got upset and even angry with the vet because of the wrong diagnosis. But actually, we were so relieved and let's face it, we've all made mistakes.  To me, this just goes to show that, there is always hope. You never know what lies ahead.

I'm ready to keep living this adventure called life. I'll hang on in and see what I'm being 'fired into' next. Who knows what that might be?

Girl archer pic, courtesey of: https://pixabay.com/en/girl-sport-bow-arrow-exercise-1909006/

Isabel Johnstone 2017