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.
No comments:
Post a Comment