The Battered Suitcase - November 2008

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As the nights grow longer, sometimes we're left wondering if those summer days could have been better spent. In a last ditch, desperate effort, we even change our clocks and fool ourselves into eking out a few more hours of precious sunlight.

In November comes an accounting of the harvest - time to tally up the gains and losses of our efforts and a time to face the mistakes of the past, before ushering in the new year. All the things we should have done, the things we shouldn't have said, the moments we never seized, the ones that lay abandoned, but still worrying, in the long grass of those distant summers. Every bad decision, every preventable accident, every injustice that can never be righted - we need to face them, if only so we can let them go.

We need to forgive ourselves and we need to move on.

Because sometimes tragedy needs to be embraced until we can allow ourselves to celebrate again. Sometimes we need to accept our mistakes and our faults before we can build a brighter future.

This month's issue of The Battered Suitcase examines those moments of regret, those lingering memories of lost opportunity, lost love and lost hope. It is populated with stark, but not ungentle portraits of people facing uncertain futures and unchangeable fates -- all of them teetering on that shaky ledge between hope and despair. And only they can choose which way to fall.

Here's to a brighter future.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it,
by working and doing for somebody else,
by using it for something else. -- Elie Wiesel.

Here's to falling on the side of hope.

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