Finding our value

I read somewhere that the path to true happiness is often blocked by our own self. That we are our own worst enemies. It went on to say that we, in a sense, have to lose our mind to be happy. Well if that is true, I should have been happy a long time ago!

I did find out later in the book what the author meant by that. When we were small children we experienced life very differently, that everyday was a new adventure and as we got older we stopped experiencing things in that same way. Our minds started to define and categorize all the experiences and events that happened to us and around us. We learned to be self critcal and judmental of not only ourselves, but those around us. The bottom line was we needed to live life in the "Here and Now" we need to go back to experiencing the world around us on a day to day basis as we did before we got all hardened and jaded by life.

Just like a child's first step out on the lawn, the pointy blades of grass tickle us and it's a new wonderful experience. When was the last time you experienced that sensation? I was talking to a friend last night and we discussed how we don't see things about ourselves that others do. Like the way we go out of our way to give to others, to help, to be kind, to do what we would want someone to do for us...but it seems like normal behavior to us so we don't see it as something bigger than that. We don't see our own value. Does this mean we are missing our purpose? Are we so blinded by our own self that we can't see our purpose?

By finding your purpose in life you find your connection to the bigger picture. To the bubble outside of your own. For me it is by doing random acts of kindness and hoping that those acts of kindness are being paid forward. Finding things that bring you joy and happiness and then doing that for others. Hoping they then find that within themselves and do the same. It's knowing that you have helped someone and brought a little light into their world. Also by getting out in nature and enjoying a nice sunny day will help you appreciate what beauty there is in the world around you. Sometimes just being aware of our own surroundings make us more connected.

All of this doesn't happen over night. It takes a long time and lots of bad choices along the way to guide you to the place that puts you on the right path. It also comes with learning to change your frame of mind from the negative to the positive and seeing things in a different light. That is so easy to write but really, really difficult to do in life. For me especially, I have been spending so much energy focused on what I miss that I have probably missed so many opportunities right in front of me. I've said it before and I will say it again....it's hard to be an adult!

Life is a constantly moving ride. If you don't keep your hands inside at all times you will have a price to pay. Thinking back on life as a kid where all you had to do was learn to tie your shoes, ride a bike or learn to swim, that was easy. Someone did your laundry, made you dinner - well, sometimes, but overall, you were takend care of. You didn't have to think. Life was easy, you rode your bike, played at the park and things like a ride on the see-saw was your biggest stress factor.

The see-saw is a great metaphor for life, it's the constant up-down-up-down movement that really keeps things interesting and in balance. You always had that moment of panic that your end wouldn't rise up when it was time and then all of a sudden, you were up - feet dangling and nothing at that very moment mattered. I guess as adults we can have moments like that, we can give and receive, have boisterous times and quiet times. We can dance ecstatically and then spend some time resting in quiet, calmness. As long as we have a fire in our belly and tears in our eyes we will have that integrated balance that makes us human.

Please keep your arms and legs in at all times and as always, no smoking. Enjoy the ride.

It's over

You know that feeling you have in a job or a relationship or just in general, where you just wake up and you KNOW, without a doubt, it's over. You have nothing left to give inside that can offer anything more to the situation and you know for all parties involved it's just best to walk away, to quit, to stop pretending anymore. It's over.

Problem is, usually when it's over you have a plan, an idea, a place to go to recharge, to make over your life. Change is in the wind, all you have to do is open your arms and embrace it. I read this quote in my Oprah magazine "a make-over shouldn't turn you into someone else - it should lead to a better you." Isn't that what we are doing when we reach that point and move on....looking for a better us? Searching for that elusive thing that makes us happy, makes us feel loved, brings us joy? Isn't that what experiences are about...to find out what works for us and what doesn't? Reinvention doesn't happen when you hate the person you are right now.

Along with change comes the baggage we choose to take with us on our journey. I heard a quote once that said "I am looking for someone with baggage to match mine." Makes me giggle a little but really it's true. You don't want to someone with a lot of mismatched baggage, you don't mind some, even it it's tattered, torn and kinda worn around the edges, but it has to sort of match yours...you can't be going against who you really are. That's the hard part, at least it seems to be for me. It's like the only baggage left out there is some crazy funky pattern I just can't make go with mine....and mine is crazy enough.

Life is full of twists and turns, feel like sometimes the only thing to do is to start looking at everything again until you forget what you're supposed to see and then actually just see what is really there. Time to take off the rose-colored glasses and look at things as they really are, no sense in pretending they are anything more that what they really are.

You never know what is going to cause a memorable event for yourself or for someone else. A few years ago I had a night I can't erase from my brain. It's forever etched in my mind as a pivotal point in my adult life. It wasn't planned, it was a sort of spontaneous moment in time that I wish I could capture and have everyday, but it's not to be....but I have that moment in time, that place and that person forever etched into my memory.

I often do things without much thought...some would claim I am not living in the moment and maybe that's true but it's who I am...at least right now. I blogged about that after hearing this great speaker who talked about living in the moment and how we don't really do that very well and how it's something we have to FORCE upon ourselves. Not sure that's good or bad. I often go through my life in such a state of routine that I forget about the moment in time I am in.

In making some drastic changes in my life lately, I've suddenly realized that sometimes I am the creator of moments for other people that they then hang onto and remember and refer back to that I didn't really think meant anything at all. It's a weird sort of moment when you realize you have made someone else's world shine for just a moment. I'm the cause of that one moment in time they remember and talk about and hopefully smile about.

I get so self involved most days trying to force my round self into so many square places that I forget I can and do have an impact on others. It feels like an immense responsibility for me now to know this.

Complacent life

As time moves on we settle into routines. We settled into a life, a job, a relationship and after a small amount of time we get into a rhythm or routine that becomes something we do without thinking about it.

We get up, make coffee, pack a lunch, take a shower, go to work, come home, dinner, dishes, laundry, maybe something fun but then we do it all over again. We settle into a unconcerned lifestyle until something jumps in and shakes it up for us.

I've been living that kind of a life this year....and I'm not sure it's for me. Last year I chose a path of "NO RULES" and set out on an adventure...that quickly faded into being my past. It's funny how fast that happens. I've been struggling feeling like I need to "re-capture" that again like an aging actress trying to recapture her youth for the cameras. The fact of the matter is, the past is the past and there is not going back. It's a hard, big, bitter pill to swallow but I think I finally have choked it down, or at least it's headed that way.

For so long I've clung to the things I love about my life, I've held them tightly to my chest like a small child holding the string of a balloon. Slowly I've felt the string slipping from my grasp but the tighter I held and the more focused on the string slipping only caused it to slip away harder. It's hard to feel like you are standing still while the world around you moves and shapes and grows but you are stuck on a rock that doesn't budge.....holding on with all your might to your balloon hoping to keep it from getting away, from blowing away in the wind. The more you try, the harder it gets until one day, without you even realizing it....the balloon is gone and all you have left is the memory of how grand it looked floating free and easy above your head.

We all do this in one way or another, we become complacent with our life, our journey, our relationships. We no longer try to make things better, stronger, more exciting. It takes too much effort, to much time...just too much. It's easier to just be.....right?

Sometimes it takes a major life event to cause us to look outside ourselves. To see the world through someone else's glasses. It's funny, if you ask 10 people what they think your own life is like, you will get 10 different answers. We present pieces of our self to people, groups, situations so differently and it's the rare person who knows us well. I recently started a new part time job and I was in training with 6 other people. We went around the room and had to introduce ourselves to each other, the funny thing is I will most likely never see these employees again because none of us will be working in the same dept. but we had to share a little about ourselves. I thought isn't that interesting. For two minutes I can be anything I want to be to these complete strangers and they will never know anything different of me. They don't care to know anything more about me....yet here I am, expected to say something about myself.

Do you say something like, Hi, I am trying like hell to get back the life I had last year and I'm deeply unhappy with my life as it is laid out right now or do I do the standard I am excited to be selling women's shoes? How do we break out of the life we've worked so many years to create? Do we choose to stay on this path of least resistance or do we forge ahead into something unknown and hope for the best?

It's easy to not go against the grain, to just keep doing what we always do. I see some of the lifeless faces coming into work everyday and I wonder, where is their passion? Where is their joy? What makes them tick? I read this quote today that I really liked about smiling eyes:

She turned to me & whispered, don't you just love it when you get so excited you forget to breathe? & the thought of her smiling eyes still makes me laugh.

It's said that our eyes are the windows to our soul........it's interesting what we let in and ultimately let out.

You may as well be happy...

.....because no one really cares if you're miserable. Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry, and you cry alone.

It seems to me that when things are good and going your way your world is filled with people, fun, happiness and light. Like a roller coaster on the upward leg of it's journey. Exciting and filled with possibilites. When you are down, need a boost or just a hand to hold it's like you are alone in the land of misfit toys. No one wants to be there when your down.

How are you suppose to manage life's ups and downs if when your down, your alone? You need a friend at that time to pat you on the back, take a shot with you and help you move on. Not one to ignore you, put you on the back burner and act like "eh, your fine....get over it." I sure hope I'm not like that to my friends when they are down and out.

I'm not saying throw money at them and let them live on your couch for years while they piss and moan about a bad life, I'm saying be a friend, let them vent and steer them back on the path of goodness and light.

The older I get, the more life experience I get I seem to have more questions than answers. A few days ago a friend of mine made this statement "Wouldn't it be great if you got the really important life lessons when you were twenty-eight instead of forty-eight? Actually, I suppose I probably did, but was just blathering too loudly myself to actually listen."

I can't stop thinking about that statement. What if we already learned all the things we needed to know and just missed the opportunity to really hear it....and live it. Is it too late? Is it ever really too late? I know the answer is a resounding NO...but I still wonder. Do we sometimes miss our chance because we are so outside ourselves at the time that we don't see the forest for the trees?

No one really cares when your miserable. No one is going to be your knight in shining armour and come galloping in to make things better, you have to do that for yourself. You have to be able to stand yourself back up...brush all the crap life throws at you off and keep on marching. If you don't, then what's the point? Sometimes the lessons of life seem so easy, so simple that a child could master them yet as a child we are no where near the maturity level to be able to handle them. Then we get so wrapped up in the everday management of our own life that by the time we are close to being a mature adult (for some people that may never happen) that we just sort of gloss over it.

Too bad we don't have a rewind or a fast forward button.

What is best?

The older I get, the harder I know what is best for me anymore. As a kid, you relied on your parents or adults in your life to do that for you. They knew what was best for me, even if I didn't want to accept that fact that I couldn't have ice cream for dinner.

This message came today: You're the only person who knows what's right for you. The only one.
And if you already know what this is, commit to it. If you don't, commit to nothing.

I love that. It's a very important thought in my life right now. Commit to something. I think that's what I'm missing lately...a sense of belonging to something bigger than me. Something I can commit to 100%.

I've been feeling like the things I am doing in my life are sort of going against my internal grain. You know that old saying, going against the grain? I feel like my job, my personal life, my family life, even my friendships have been really challenged in the last few months. I feel like I am having to work so hard at maintaining all of them...it makes me wonder what's changed? What's shifted that makes me work so hard at ALL aspects of my life. Am I really doing what's best for me? How does one know what is best?

I know life is about a series of mistakes, trial and errors but it's kind of exhausting to have to keep that level of fight up day after day after day. Mama needs a break. Not like a vacation, feet in the sand kind of a break, although I sure wouldn't say NO to that, more of a mental break. A break from making my mind work so hard to figure things out. No wonder I can't sleep at night. I fill my head all day long with stuff that by the time my body wears out, my brain is still going strong. I really have to find a way to exhaust my brain.

Doing what's best...it seems easy when your deciding this for someone else. I want so bad to tell my friend the person she is so enamoured with is a jerk and she deserves better, but she's happy and who am I to tell her what's best? I want to tell my friend that the job she is in is sucking her soul dry and she has nothing left to give anyone else in her life because she is 110% devoted to a job that doesn't give her anything more than a paycheck, but again, who am I to tell her what's best. I'm sure if people look too closely at my life they have a check list of things to tell me what's best for me.

I guess that's what this little gig is about, life. It's about learning and moving along our path and figuring out what is in our own best interest. I just wish it wasn't so hard.

A reason for every season

I don't know if it's my age, my mental state or just that fact that I just need to let out what's filtering around in my head, but lately I've been feeling quite emotional. I cry for the life that's passed me by, I get sad at the things I don't have in my life, I laugh at the silliest things (my friends dogs ears flipped) until I have tears rolling down my cheeks...and feel unmeasurable love and gratefulness (is that a word?) for the friends in my life.

I recently found this article that I've pared down because it was INCREDIBLY long, but I really liked the message. Made me think and happy....usually not a combination I have.

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.

When someone is in your life for a REASON, it is usually to meet a need you have expressed. They have come to assist you through a difficult time or to provide you with guidance and support, to aid you physically, emotionally or spiritually. They seem like a godsend and they are. They are there for the reason you need them to be. Then, without any wrong doing on your part or at an inconvenient time, this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end. Sometimes they die, or walk away. Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand and what we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled and their work is done. The prayer you sent up has been answered and now it is time to move on.

Then there are those people that come into your life for a SEASON, because your turn has come to share, grow or learn. They may teach you something you have never done and they usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it, it is real, but only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons, things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas of your life.

It is said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant.

The Art of Saying (and meaning it) No

So many times we do things out of obligation. We say YES when we really mean DEAR GOD NO! We commit ourselves, our time; even our finances to things we really don't want to. Is it because we are afraid to say NO? Because saying no to something equates to being alone, bored, unhappy? I'm not sure where it all went off track..but I am saying YES to saying NO.

It only has two letters, but "no" is a powerful word. It's a simple fact that you can never be productive if you take on too many commitments, you end up spreading yourself too thin and then you are ultimately not good at any of them. It also can take the joy out of the things you really want to be doing because you become so focused on what's on your plate.

Recently I found myself really, sadly disappointed by a friend. We had been planning an event, an outing, a day-o-fun as I like to call it, for quite a while. We talked about it non-stop, planned for it, giggled about it but when it came time to actually doing it, she pulled out. She said NO. I was really disappointed by it. If she would have been honest with me up front and said OMG, I totally want to do this but I a) can't afford it, b) can't leave my family alone, c) don't really want to spend that much time with you.....whatever the reason, I would have been OK with it. I would have accepted it. So why do we do this? Why do we say YES when we really mean NO?

I am really exhausted by those people that say YES to everything and yet rarely show up or participate or contribute to what they have agreed to. It's time to take back the power of saying NO and use it for good, not evil.

I get that saying NO is an art form, and the more you do it, the better you get at it. If there is one thing I have learned as I've gotten older, it's that saying NO sometimes means saying YES to something else.

I wonder what things would be like if we really only commit to those things we really feel we can give our all to? Or is it possible that by doing things we may not be 100% committed to we actually learn something new? That we push ourselves to a new peak or place we've never been to? Is it possible that saying YES when we really mean NO can teach us something positive?

No, probably not. See....that wasn't so hard.

Choice or Chance?

Choice, not chance determines our destiny. So many times it's not WHAT you say, but how you say it that makes the difference. Saying "I'm sorry" and meaning it is much different than just saying the words. Saying "I love you" out of routine or habit is not the same as looking someone in the eyes and saying "I love you".

Go to any restaurant or coffee shop and look at the people around you. How do they carry themselves? Do they look happy? Do they look like they are totally digging their life? Do you?

The Universe, in all it's wisdom, provided this thought for me:

Young souls learn to accept responsibility for their actions. Mature souls learn to accept responsibility for their thoughts. Old souls learn to accept responsibility for their happiness.

Why must we be old before we learn the lessons life has to teach us? How come we can't learn to get by earlier with little victories? I wonder if in my next life I'll live with no fear, stand tall and strong knowing all that I need to know to get by.

Perhaps someday the world will catch up with us all and we will wake up knowing what it is we need to know right now. It seems like some life tragedy or big life issue has to happen for us to realize what it is we all should know about ourselves all along. Life true to who we are and we should be fine.

I suppose it's time to figure out who I am.