“WAKE UP!!! Make my bed, shower up, eat breakfast, drink coffee, brush my teeth, stumble to the car, rush to work in this awful traffic so I’m not late to work… Uhhhhhrrrr!!!!”

 

Life is frustrating. Day in and day out, the long year makes it easy to get mired in the muck of the daily grind and the drama that just pops up in life. These difficulties can wear us down and distract us from the goals we have made; they can make us think “how can life be like this??” They are the big and little challenges that we will inevitably face in the good fight we all fight to go through this life a good person, a good son, brother, daughter, sister, father, mother, partner, friend, neighbor, citizen, etc. And although they can be scary, frustrating, infuriating and sometimes seemingly insurmountable… that’s all they are,… challenges and distractions we must overcome to get back to our major plan, whatever that may be. Life requires us to be resilient to have a chance at success, we try to teach this resilience to our participants because life is like that: challenging & unavoidable, and they will encounter these challenges for the rest of their lives,… like we do.

 

Thankfully, the holiday season slows us down a bit and gives us an opportunity to think about the wonderful things that have happened to us and the things we can appreciate in our lives. We at Next Step Reentry feel a great sense of purpose with the job we do, as I’m sure all at Family Assistance Program do, but more so, we all feel a tremendous sense of appreciation for the opportunity we have just to be in a position to be able to provide the type of support we have been able to provide to our participants, and our community at large. We are privileged to do this work and are humbled for it.