The document discusses finding certainty and belonging during difficult times. It reflects on a time when the narrator had to move as a child and lost the familiar aspects of their life. As a teenager, the narrator discovered ugly truths about the people they looked up to and had to decide whether to follow their path or rise above it. The narrator chose to find their own path to happiness and true comfort, though they still face struggles at times to restore certainty. The document advocates finding ways to redirect focus during hard times, like through hobbies or passions, as a way to regain stability.

1. Finding CertaintyMarch 222010“Anyway, he uh... he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18... Ah, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? High school-those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that.”Erin Peck<br />One time; What is one time, you think, when you had to find you way back to that place of certainty, where everything felt right, or that one time when you needed to find honor, honor so that you felt like you belonged, were wanted or were needed? Every day you struggle to find that one place, the happy place some may say, where even for a moment everything feels perfect, and every piece of the puzzle connects where it should, unlike most times when you force some of the pieces together because they appear that they match, but sometimes you are not even looking for the place of belonging, sometimes you are sitting, trying to reexamine yourself, trying to find a time when you were missing that one thing, and what decision you had made to change it. Every choice has a price, and now you begin to see it; you begin to see the changes in the people around, how they treat you, what they say and do not say to you. You see how the events in your life create new trends, or stay in an old routine. This old routine begins to drive you nuts when you realize what is happening and you make another decision to rearrange to puzzle, try something new. From here you can only hope that the events which follow make you happy, that when you take that leap off the cliff your parachute opens to save you before you hit bottom. <br />Remember back to the time when had to move so suddenly, after you had just finished kindergarten, you were not moved to a different town, or school, just ten miles north, to a small acreage, but you knew it would not be the same as the farm. You would never have the sandbox under the tree again, there would not be calves in the spring to help feed, and Grand-Dad and Grandma would not be just up the road anymore. In fact, after you moved you saw your grandparents less, and it became that you never saw them at all. You even started to see your cousins less, holidays began to happen with only one side of the family. Through all of this you could tell, that all the adults in your life knew why, but you did not want to ask, for you knew that they would not tell you, they could not tell you, to protect all the certainty you had in the world. <br />Eventually, when you got older and matured, the truth started to come out. Your teenage years brought a whirlwind of truth out. You discovered the ugly sides of the people that you grew up looking up to. You saw how people really treat each other; that not every person out there was one-hundred percent truly good. Now, you were left at a cross-road, a decision whether you were going to become like all of them, or whether you were going to rise above it. You are glad today that you made the right decision; you saw that even though you are a product of your environment you don’t have to be exactly like those around you. You needed some way to feel like you respected yourself, you needed a sense of honour towards yourself. <br />Making that choice was a hard thing, but you are a good person today because of it. Your parents are both proud of you, and your relationship with your brother is much better. That choice was not necessarily public but it was in your heart, you knew that you wanted to find true happiness and enjoyment out of life and so you decided to rise up above all of the lies that were being told and the resent held towards each other, and create your own path; a path to a place where you were certain and comfortable. <br />However, that does not go without saying you are not going to find struggle in your life, that once in a while you won’t hit a wall that you can climb right away. Sometimes you will see a train rushing past and wonder if that is how your life is going; just slow enough to count the cars but not to admire the graffiti. There have been times, and places when you had to get back to the heart of things, or find another outlet to focus your attention on, even for a short time. When you have spare time, you find yourself wanting to just sit and not have to think about anything, not have to worry about what comes next, or the next deadlines to be met. <br />Individuals are met with struggles to restore certainty and honor in many different circumstances, and how they find ways to deal with these struggles perhaps, becomes circumstantial in itself. In Don McKay’s poem, “Setting up the Drums,” he comments on how an individual tries to get back to the heart of things, using the drums as all of the circumstances in our lives which we have to set up, organize around and hope that they stay standing. In the excerpt taken from “Redemption,” John Gardener gives us a character, who had a major fault in his life, and found the only way out was to turn his attention to something else entirely. To pick up from his old life, and move on, he found a new passion, and a new place to put his emotions. <br />Bibliography BIBLIOGRAPHY Little Miss Sunshine. (2010). Retrieved March 22, 2010, from IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449059/quotes <br />