People are people and this world is filled with lots of them.  Family, friends, neighbors, co-workers the list goes on and on.  Life is full  of constant introductions and interactions with others.  There are people we like, people we tolerate and people we love.  While philosophers have spent the ages trying to figure out the meaning of life, I take a more simplistic view.  I believe we are here to be happy and share that happiness with the world.   I have learned to recognize life’s blessings, be grateful, make a positive difference and to recognize when it is time to move on.  I view each day as a lesson.  I may learn something about myself or someone else, but I try to be pragmatic and look at things in the scheme of ‘life’; the big picture of  achieving my goals to take care of my family, help those in need and keep myself healthy along the way.  Everyone however,  is faced with the toxic person who sucks the life right out of us.  The person who is angry, self-centered and destructive. This is the person I steer clear of.  Sometimes this person presents themselves in the form of a neighbor, co-worker or ‘friend’, which makes the decision to extricate yourself from them fairly easy.  What however, if this person is a member of your own family?  To what lengths does someone go to in order to try to ‘preserve’ a relationship when all that relationship does is destroy you?  Like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, not every relationship is a perfect fit, in fact most are not.  We must be willing to compromise, be silent and be accepting.  There are times though, when we need to re-evaluate our relationships and make the tough decision our own well-being far outweighs any benefit of dealing with a toxic person.  Positive people are a blessing, the negative ones a cancer.   We remove cancer with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.   Just like cancer, in order to survive it is necessary to remove toxic people from our life in order to preserve ourselves.  The decision is never an easy one, however the reward is monumental.  There are times you have to ‘cut your losses’ and walk away from the drama for our own sake because our lives depend upon it.