I’m not the brightest bulb in the tanning bed, and I’m not an expert at anything. But one thing I’ve learned, especially in the past couple years, is that life is guaranteed to clobber me with plot twists. They’re bound to mess with my carefully laid plans. Accepting and adjusting is the tough part because it’s easy to dwell on the past. It was a healing day when I realized that if I kept looking back while trying to move forward, I was either going to turn into a pillar of salt (Wait, that was Lot’s wife, right?), or I was going to run into something and hurt myself again.

In my 33 years on this planet, I’ve learned a few things, most of them the hard way, and some of them because I was in the right place at the right time.