Wind and Fences--A Paragraph a Day

We had a windstorm last night, and a pretty strong one--half of our fence is down out front, and we lost electricity for a couple of hours.  It still remains to be seen how much other damage was done.  It's not a disaster for us, though, as we still have a safe place to live and sleep, and we have food to eat.  It gets me thinking, though, about just how strong this planet is and just how quickly things in our lives can be changed significantly by something as fleeting as a storm that passes through in the matter of a couple of hours.  And isn't that how much of our lives are, too?  That person who's rude to us in the supermarket stays with us for a very long time in our minds, yet is out of our life pretty quickly.  That accident that we had changed everything, even though before it happened it seemed that things were going along quite normally.  Life does change, and our experiences of life change--that's just a rule of life.  While we can't live always dreading the unknown future or thinking about what might happen tomorrow, we do need to be able to deal with change, to accept the fact that the winds and the rains will hit us sometimes, and our main task after they do is to accept the fact that they were here and just go out and fix the fence.  Crying about the broken fence does nothing but add stress to our lives, but fixing it allows us to move on to the other things that are much more important.  So an hour from now, I'll go out and fix it.  It may end up costing more than I expect and it may be a bit more difficult than it looks, but at least I'll be accepting the fact that it needs fixing, and I'll be doing something about that fact.