Welcome to May!
May is one of my favorite months because, in addition to all the blooming flowers and trees, there are three important dates—May Day, one of my favorite days of the year for its sweetness, Mother’s Day and our wedding anniversary, number 16 this year on the 31st.
This May brings another big event: I’m leading the first-ever (re)Discover Your Spark experiences to Bath, England in the middle of the month; one for couples with Dr Marry and one for individuals. Both with Quinn, our son and signature Spark mixologist.
After all the talking and planning, I can’t believe we’re just days away from taking off. There won’t likely be many new blog posts this month because, in addition to Bath, we’ll be in Windsor, the Lake District, Blenheim Palace, Oxford and Florence, Italy. We’re going to be busy, and I want to be present for it all!
I’m not telling you this to evoke envy, and I’m sorry if it does.
Believe me, I distinctly remember feeling that emotion multiple times in my life.
If you know our story, you know that Dr Marry and I (and Quinn, too) had plenty of years where travel like this was simply not possible. In fact, before Mazz got sober in 2017, it had been 13 years since Quinn and I had been to England with him.
Or if you know my personal story from before meeting Dr Marry, you know that those years were filled with such limited financial resources and despair at my lost dream that a trip like this would never have even been something I could contemplate.
The larger point I hope you take from this is that, even if you are certain you have failed, life can, and will, change. And it can change for the better…even when you believe it absolutely can’t.
2016 Dayna Del Val would have ruefully laughed in your face if you showed her this blog post; she couldn’t have grasped that it could ever be her life.
That year, only months before Mazz got sober, I was, again, contemplating how to leave our marriage, how to walk away from what felt like an endless, sad spiral to a bottom I couldn’t see and didn’t understand.
There was no indication that anything was going to get better or ever be different.
And then suddenly, but also gradually over a period of weeks and months, it did get better and it was different.
Change in a positive direction is absolutely possible, but you might have to hit your own rock bottom before you move forward down a new, healthy, joyful path.
Or maybe your path of change requires you to let go of something you desperately want so that something else that’s not even on your radar can emerge.
You might not be traveling to England and Italy this May, but if it’s a dream of yours, look at your life and see what changes you can make right now to take that trip next May, or the one after that, or the one after that…
Your path is not fixed, no matter how settled in cement you might feel right this moment. If you want something different, if you hope to put a dream in past tense, then go out and start from right where you are to work toward it.
I say this often because it’s universally true: if you spend your days working toward the positive change you desire, the Spark that lights you up, you will have more joy, more unexpected opportunities and more likelihood of getting to the end of your journey and saying, “That was a good run!”
Choose today, and throughout the month of May, to work toward positive change because, while the Universe hands out gifts, it also waits for us all to realize that we have an active role to play in the change we want to experience, too.
And that is what it’s really all about, this crazy thing we call life.
