If you have found yourself asking “why me?” recently, trust me, you aren’t alone. One thing after another seems to be rolling our way, and all most people want to know is, when is it going to end?

Somehow a lot of people get this idea that life is supposed to be more like a train ride. The track is laid out, all we have to do is sit back and wait until we get where we are going. There are very few surprises when you ride the train, a bit of trouble here, a surprise there but for the most part it is a smooth ride.

Maybe it’s because I am a Colorado girl, but I have come to believe that life was never meant to be a smooth ride.

Living in Colorado is always an adventure. At first the unpredictability of Colorado can throw you off. The weather is ever changing, one minute the sun is shining brightly, the next the storm clouds roll in. A few moments later the wind comes wailing through and the storm clouds have blown away.

No, life doesn’t always go the way we would like it to. Sometimes it rains when you want the sun to shine, and sometimes we are happy to see the snow falling but then we remember that snow isn’t always fun. It means work, it means mud, it means messes.

Traveling is always interesting in Colorado as well.

For a few miles you have fairly straight stretches, but there are twists and curves that lead through the canyons, an immense wall of stone on one side of the road and a river snaking along the other. From flat lands to steep mountain passes, to rolling hills of green. A drive through Colorado can take you through every terrain imaginable in a very short amount of time. There are a lot of parts of the Colorado desert that are just hot and dry where nothing but sagebrush can really survive, but they are just the route to some of the most beautiful scenery imaginable.

Part of the reason I love living in Colorado is that always changing nature. It reminds me that I am alive, it reminds me of the true nature of life. Life has its ups and downs, it has its twists and turns. Some of them are pleasant and others just plain stink. As long as things are changing we are still alive, still moving forward.

In Colorado, we may come to a few mountain passes now and then, but we can always guarantee that the pass will end and we will find ourselves cruising down the other side. All we have to do is make it to the top. We may get used to speeding our way through the straight stretches, but those curves can really sneak up on us.

Life is bound to throw us a few curve balls, but the important thing is not avoiding those bumps and hills, or even those mountains it is knowing without a doubt that what begins must end, and no matter how bad the hard times seem... none of them last forever. As long as we keep going, what goes up must always come back down again.

Recently a fire took out a large section of the forest along one of our more traveled routes. Most of the vegetation has been destroyed. As we drove through I lamented that it just wouldn’t be the same. There will be no lush green masses of summer grass, no vibrant color displays this fall, no branches blanketed in snow, and no watching the world come alive in the spring as the whole process repeats itself.

Then, my step-daughter perked up. "Look Mom! There is a tree that wasn’t killed, and another, and another... Mom! There are survivor trees!"

She was right, there weren’t a whole lot of them, but they were there. Some of them made it through the fire. Some of them will make it, some of us will too. That’s what survivors do. We keep going when others have long given up.

Yes, I suppose I will always be a Colorado girl at heart, Colorado will always remind me of the many lessons we must learn to make it through this life.

So very many lessons to learn.