Tuesday Tales Bookstore debuts today. Tuesday Tales is a group of authors that post a weekly snippet, written to a different word or picture prompt. Today we’re sharing some of our published books, stories that got their start in Tuesday Tales. I’m sharing one of my books, A Second Chance.
Here’s a blurb about A Second Chance, followed by an excerpt. Take a peek and check it out. Then head back to Tuesday Tales for more fascinating reads. (Pssst…I’ve heard that some of the authors may even be sharing some FREE books on their pages!)
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Not everyone gets a second chance at life. Usually, ‘the end’ is just that – the end. But, sometimes, a lucky person steps away from death’s door and gets a second chance. Jenny got hers one day on an early morning flight to California. But now she faces something even bigger. What will she do with this second chance that was offered to her? Will her life change? Will she do anything differently? Or will she fill her life with the same choices she made before her cardiac arrest?
Here’s an excerpt from A Second Chance:
Chapter 7
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
December 14th
Although I despised working almost every Saturday, the one saving feature was that I had a day off during the week. This Tuesday morning I enjoyed a leisurely morning of sleeping in.
After pouring a glass of orange juice, I turned on my computer and quickly went to Facebook to catch up with the world around me. Michelle Barr, an inspirational woman I follow, had posted an interesting thought. She was talking about dreaming big dreams and setting goals and intentions, and she wrote:
“…everything that is not in alignment with that rises up to be healed or transformed. I call that ‘Your stuff coming up.’ You can choose to heal and clear this so that you can move forward…”
Hmmm, I’ve noticed that my dreams contained lots of anger. There were old frustrations surfacing in my mind, mostly when my body had shut down for the night. Some of these memories and angers were from way back, some of them twenty years ago. Maybe, in order to heal and go forward, I couldn’t suppress these feelings anymore. I needed to deal with them to heal.
I knew that one way of releasing hurts and negative emotions is journaling. I decided to pursue that, to try to clear the chaff from my mind and my subconscious. I headed to my bookcases, knowing I had several nice, blank journals to choose from. Looking through them I couldn’t decide which one to use. They were all too ‘pretty’; too pretty to write ugly thoughts in.
Maybe a school composition book.
Then I had another thought. If I’m writing these words to ‘get them out of my life’, then I don’t want them written down and engraved in ink so that I can go back and re-read them, keeping them permanently on the page.
I decided to use scrap paper and write the ‘ugly’ things on them, the musings I didn’t want to see again, the thoughts and feelings I was trying to release. I’ll write them down, then tear up the paper and toss it in the trash. They will be my trash journals. I thought that the tearing up and throwing away would symbolically help me too.
The next day at work, as I headed out to my car for lunch, I grabbed some scratch paper to take with me. I scribbled away the entire time.
December 15: I’m going to begin my ‘trash’ journal. I don’t want to write in a pretty journal and keep my words forever. I don’t want these where anyone else can see them I don’t want them where I can go back and re-read them and keep them in my mind. The purpose of these are to release the negatives and the anger – to write it and acknowledge it and then throw the words away and move on with my life.
I’m trying to accentuate the positive – to think on the good things to bring more of the good into my life. But … I still have some angers and negative, complaining thoughts in my head. Some old. Some new. Some frustrations with life. I won’t consider these complaints as I’m trying to strive to be complaint-free. This is for healing. Because I find if I don’t express these thoughts, they creep into my dreams and my sleep. They find their way to surface in some manner. And working themselves out in anxious, angry dreams isn’t helpful. It brings matters to my attention, but if I don’t do anything, it’s like an un-lanced abscess – still festering away and keeping me from the peaceful, joyful life that I deserve.
Releasing these feelings will allow for an enhanced spiritual life – one where I know myself better – where I’m more attuned to those around – where my spiritual and psychic senses can open up –a life where I can be in contact with my guides and where life in general is the life I need to be living.
I fully believe that for circumstances to have been what they were the day my heart stopped, that it was not my time to go. There is still more I need to learn or something I still have yet to do. Otherwise, I would have left this life peacefully fifteen minutes before the alarm on a normal, routine Thursday morning.
Instead, I was in an airplane, in an unusual and out of the ordinary trip to San Francisco – with Carla beside me to sound the alarm and start CPR to keep me here … with three doctors within a forty to fifty foot radius of me … with medical equipment and a defibrillator within arm’s reach.
What are the odds of that? Astronomical, I’d venture to guess. To know this, with every fiber of my being – but yet to continue life as before – unchanged – would be a gross waste. A travesty.
To honor the unseen guides and loved ones that were with me, and the physical beings on this earthly plane that were responsible for keeping me here with every effort of their beings, I choose to move forward and live a higher life. The purpose of my life is not to work a mundane day-to-day job, to eke out a bare bones paycheck-to-paycheck life. The trivialities and pettiness of co-workers are not important to me or why I’m here. I choose to move beyond that.
I choose to do the things necessary to my life, in living a higher life. One of the necessary things I need to do is to release anger and frustration – not to keep them sequestered and buried deep in the recesses of my mind. That, I choose to begin doing today. The other things, I’ll learn along my new path.
I intended to write down the ugly thoughts, then tear them up and throw them in the trash.
Something about this first journaling prompted me to keep it. I began with negative thoughts and emotions, yet thirty minutes later, at the end of my lunch, I’d already moved into an epiphany. I felt I needed to keep this ‘A-Ha’ moment.
I met Carla for dinner that night, and shared what I’d been contemplating all day.
“I’ll be changing,” I warned her.
“Changing?” she asked, acutely more attentive to my words. “Changing how?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ll find out as I go along. It won’t be huge changes, like I’m not suddenly going to start doing drugs…or move to Alaska…or have any other drastic life changes. My basic personality is still going to remain ‘me’. But my life has to change, in some fashion. It would be a huge waste if it didn’t.”
I read her the last part of what I’d written and tried to explain how I felt I must become more attuned with my spirituality, not in a “church” or organized religion way, but as my inner being and connectedness to a higher power and all that is linked together. I had to question ‘why?’ I intended to slough off the pretenses and false faces that I often wear to the rest of the world. I had to become real. I had to be true to myself.
“I still don’t totally understand. C’mon Jenny. Fess up. Are you…like…gonna move? Going to change jobs? Shave your head and move into a commune?” she joked.
“No, nothing that radical. But, I have to take this second chance and have it stand for something. I have to change.” I took a sip of water, trying to come up with the words to explain what raced around in my brain. “To continue life unchanged is like taking this second chance and throwing it in the trash. It would make it mean nothing. And, I don’t want to disregard the importance of this opportunity.”
“As long as we’re still friends. I don’t want to lose your friendship over your journey of becoming more, as you say, real.”
“We will always be friends. You know how far Amber and I go back. You know I don’t take my friendships lightly, nor do I lose friends over trivial matters.” I reached across the table and patted her hand to acknowledge my words. “But, to go further with these new goals, to take off my masks and attempt to truly live a more authentic life, with loftier dreams and aspirations – will mean I must make changes in my life.”
That night I copied a quote in my journal, my ‘pretty’ journal, the one that I keep:
“Nature is one connected whole. At any given moment every part must be precisely what it is, because all other parts are what they are, and not a grain of sand could be moved from its place without changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.” Johann Gottlies Fichte, 1800
After the quote, I added these words:
My intent is to move some grains of sand, not a lot of sand, but important ones. And in the moving of these few select grains, the immeasurable whole will reflect changes. I cannot do this and remain the same identical person.
Onward bound, here we go…to a life with greater awareness!
Whatever that life may be. What was coming up ahead was the biggest mystery and I had no earthly idea what was in my future.
Thanks for stopping by today!
A Second Chance is available as an ebook or paperback
But she couldn’t dwell on that. Mrs. Stone was off in another flurry, opening the cupboards that ran the full length of three sides of the class. “…samples are in here…textile samples…wallpaper books…paint chips here…”
The winner of last week’s contest won a set of cedar sachets. Just for reading the newsletter and sending an answer back. She, along with others, was entered into the drawing. Nora’s name was drawn and next week the mailman will deliver a set of freshly scented sachets.
Peggy’s feeling of pride deflated as soon as she rounded the corner and saw the line of barely-twenty-somethings waiting to enter the classroom. The students – mostly girls, but not all – giggled and twittered in their clustered groups. Most wore skimpy clothes that revealed a lot of abdomen and back – certainly far more than Peggy was willing to display of her post-two-children body. She caught herself as a brief moment of wanting to cry passed through her.
Trisha Faye 