“The great thing about being [here] is that no one judges you for doing nothing, it’s practically an art form,” said by the character Mindy Chen.  I jumped on the band wagon (again a bit late to the trends but it’s still a band wagon nonetheless) and started watching “Emily in Paris”.  I love how simple things convey some of the most important messages.  It’s common sense we all live life in different ways.  Different cultures, different ideas of how to live and it’s a beautiful thing as we capture all the different facets of life and different ways to make life matter.  For those who haven’t seen the show, we have an American transplant unexpectedly learning to navigate Paris and getting a lot of life lessons on how to assimilate to a new culture. To experience different ways of life is the only way to really understand what life is like.  We take vacations to get little snippets of all the possibilities in the world but even that we approach with our American idea of what vacation is supposed to be and we think we can learn all our lessons about the world in 5 days.  We have this insane idea that our entire lives must be done on a schedule and that our worth is determined by how much we do.  Other cultures understand that learning about other ways of life establish connection whereas we approach it as some sort of conquest.  Our lifestyle promotes faster, conquest, more, bigger, stronger, and building our own empires. 

Real life is all about connection.  Not the networking type of connection where we only look at the value of someone for what they can do.  Sure, there’s a natural component of networking with people but there’s also the actual relationship we form that goes beyond.  The soul connections.  So it comes down to learning that there are other ways to do things.  And sometimes we don’t have to do anything.  We spend a lot of time moving because we feel we have to keep moving.  Other cultures really take their time and value their time and the experience of life and forming relationships and they know that in order to do that, we have to have a relationship with ourselves as well and we need to honor and recognize our own time.  That means knowing when to stop.  The reference in the quote is exactly that: in France, with life coming first, no one notices if you have to disappear for a while and if you have to take some time off.  They don’t pull the weekend warrior routine where they are so focused on work during the week that their time off is spent on all the other things in their personal life as if their personal if is something that needs to fit in between the work.  They build their lives and work to support that, not the other way around where work defines them.  Savoring life IS life.  The savoring is where we find joy and joy begets more joy.  Sometimes less is more and slowing down, we can certainly see more.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve heard a quote about Europeans savoring the time spent doing nothing—it was referenced in “Eat, Pray, Love” and it is in those moments of quiet and doing nothing that we find peace.  We come back to ourselves.  It’s completely uncomfortable to transition to doing nothing after moving all the time but if we learn to question the value of that moving and what the moving serves then we see how a little discomfort to re-regulate the nervous system really matters.  I’ve never understood why we place such a high value on buzzing about and completing the never ending to-do list.  When we’re kids we don’t worry about all that needs to be done—we focus on doing what is right in front of us at the time.  Sure, we may flit from thing to thing but we do it out of natural progression and curiosity, building our experiences through joy.  That curiosity and drive is chipped away as we are taught that all our time must be spent working toward something.  We take life far too seriously in many ways.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t have goals, I’m just saying balancing those goals requires the same level of care-free following our instincts sometimes.  It’s important to learn to do nothing so something can come of it.               

People may see us as living the dream but it might be the furthest thing from the truth.  It may look like we have everything we want but sometimes we don’t know what we want or don’t want until we get it.  I know I was trained to think that was selfish.  If we got something good in our lives it was automatically to be taken with gratitude and we must nurture it even if it wasn’t fully a seed we planted.  Sure there are things we are given in life that we must handle with care even if it isn’t of our own cultivating but there are certain things it’s ok to say, “this isn’t want I asked for, I do not need to put my energy toward it any longer.”  If we know dep down that the life we are living isn’t want we want, it’s ok to step aside and step toward what we really DO want.  Personally, I’ve watched people walk away from what I thought was my dream life.  I was so angry when they’d so casually get what I wanted, sometimes the very thing I was working for, and they seemed to treat it with such blatant disrespect, it pissed me off.  But I’ve also been on the side of things where my life (or facets of my life) were someone else’s dream and I knew it wasn’t what I wanted so I walked away—and those people were just as confused and angry with me for doing it as I was when I witnessed the same in others.  Our dream/ideal situation isn’t necessarily what others would want for themselves.  And that’s ok.    

It’s ok to give up what doesn’t work for us to crate the life that gives us meaning.  Someone else’s dream isn’t our responsibility and us trying to stick with something that isn’t aligned with our truth because someone else would want that opportunity isn’t going to do either person any favors.  We’ll feel resentment because we aren’t living our purpose and that can lead to resentment toward that person as well.  And if we don’t treat that dream with care, that person may end up resenting us because we take for granted something they want for themselves.  The other side to this is that sometimes we don’t know what our dream is until we get out there.  I’d found myself in a situation with work that I thought I asked for.  I had a project I loved, something I considered my baby because I was able to develop it for a long time.  The short version is, it turned out to be a nightmare.  Anyone would have said it was dream work simply looking at it from the outside—and I did love the work—but the truth is the effort to even prove the value at the end of the day to “the people that mattered” was too much because they had their own vision for what they THOUGHT it was rather than what the actual potential was.  So why stay forcing something to breathe that is, not only determined to die/someone is determined to kill, but that takes the very breath out of me with it?

The point is, a dream for some is a nightmare to others so we need to approach our lives wide awake.  Dismantling something we’ve invested time in is terrifying and confusing.  We question ourselves along the way, unsure of who we are because we were the ones who jumped in to build that life in the first place.  But the truth is this: it’s better to put the oxygen mask on now and bail so we can land where we were meant to be than it is to keep foraging for food on barren ground where we know we just aren’t sustained.  If we need apples and all we have are oranges, the very life in us can die out.  Some people might think that’s selfish but the truth is: it’s life sustaining.  We aren’t meant to thrive on someone else’s dream.  We need to find joy and purpose on our own and if that means breaking down what we had, we have to accept that.  The better the foundation we build, the more authentic the life we live and we won’t need to spend time in that dream state.  We can spend all the time we want living that dream instead.  We find ourselves in building the authentic life we were always meant to have.  It means doing things differently, openly, honestly and with clear intent and intention and, yes, with awareness.  Just because someone doesn’t understand that what we have doesn’t work for us any longer (even if we spent a lot of time building that first version) doesn’t mean we have to keep going with it.  We are always allowed the chance to build something new, something meant for us.  The universe demands we do because it will feel off until we build the life we are meant to have.  So wake up, get honest, get building.  The live we’re meant to have is waiting for us to do the work right here and now.  Get started.

There’s a follow up/additional quote I want to discuss from Saturday’s (I guess now Sunday’s second piece) pertaining to creating the life we want.  For context, the quote I got from Vanessa Fontana was from Stassi Schroeder’s podcast which I only just started listening to because I’d previously liked her work.  The girl may come across as entitled and vapid because of the topics she takes on, however, she takes those topics on seriously and, if anyone spends any time looking at what she creates, they will see the amount of work and effort she actually does put in.  It doesn’t matter if she’s talking about clothes or celebrity gossip, the woman is an multi New York Times best selling author, she hosts multiple podcasts across multiple networks/services, she is/was a TV personality, a model, she has her own holiday for Pete’s sake, and she grew way the fuck up all in the public eye all while becoming a wife and mother, touring her book etc., etc.  No, she isn’t unique in living that type of multi-entrepreneurial type life (and like I talked about the other day, she CHOSE to do all that) but due to the nature of her focus, it shows that even the seemingly insignificant stuff can be taken seriously to create an empire.  Creating the life we want takes work, and that’s the point: no matter what it is we want, there is work involved.

Schroeder-Clark says, “Everything worthwhile is hard, it’s not easy to get everything you always wanted. If it was, everyone would have everything they wanted. It’s difficult, it’s arduous, it’s a pain in the fucking ass, you’re going to deal with strife, with pain, it’s hard.” There are pieces of everything we do that feel more like work or feel more difficult than others. Some people may thing she is a poor example to use to have this discussion since, let’s be honest, she certainly isn’t saving the world, however, I think she is a great example because she shows that hard work and focus, even on the seemingly insignificant, can take us far.  As I spoke about yesterday, alignment brings obstacles at times, even in things others don’t consider important.  It isn’t up to us to judge what’s important or significant.  People could argue that painting is superfluous yet anyone who stands beneath the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling or walks the halls of Versailles, or who looks at the cave paintings of the first humans instantly sees the depth of humanity in that work.  It might not be life-saving, but it is certainly life-giving so it isn’t up to us to judge the significance of anything.  When Kim Kardashian said women don’t know how to work, it infuriated me—and it still does—because her context of work is VASTLY skewed to what other women do so I’m sensitive to the examples we use when it comes to the reality of our daily lives, so I apologize if this still isn’t resonating—I still feel this is timely and useful to hammer home the discussion on working to create the life we want.      

Some of us may look at people like Schroeder-Clark and think she’s a spoiled brat—and she owns that herself as well.  In the spirit of honesty, I understand why people thought the same of me because, on the surface it looked like I had everything I wanted.  The truth was I gave up everything I wanted to make people accept me a certain way—if I gave up my identity, I wanted to control their perception of me.  My frustration came from that sacrifice and I used to think everyone did that—they gave up what they wanted for the sake of others, like life was some giant game of manipulation and I lived that way far longer into adulthood than I care to admit.  No one wants to take advice from a spoiled child.  The truth is, it was never just about me getting what I WANTED, I grew up in a family that demonstrated work/creating an empire brought what we wanted.  I used to think that we were all (every person) meant to have every little thing we ever envisioned in our lives and I spent a lot of time whining about the small pieces that seemed to slip through the cracks for me.  I spent a lot of time angry when every little detail didn’t fall into place.  I spent a lot of time angry at people for getting annoyed with me because I wanted all those details correct.  Looking back I can fully admit I WAS angry/furious when things didn’t go right and I thought I was justified feeling that way because I’d always been taught that when we do what we’re supposed to the result is assured.  I thought assured meant it would turn out exactly as I envisioned so I took the little things as a personal injury or testament that I wouldn’t “get what I wanted.”  I can see where that would stress people out—and it did.  I also realized that a pattern of my younger days was to use that “emotional distress” of not getting my way to justify my anger and it created a pattern of not focusing on the big picture because I wanted the immediate gratification of what I wanted right in that moment—also a misconception Schroeder-Clark faces.

I share all that in this rambling bit of work to say our experience is all relative.  We get what we put into this life and, if we want something specific, it takes specific vision and work to get it.  I share this also as a reminder that “assured” doesn’t mean “exact.”  I 100% see the moments I persisted in something because I thought I was right and it was worth it but I also 100% see when I should have bowed out.  Given time, some of those things were proven true and I was right—and had certain people played along earlier, we would have saved ourselves a ton of time.  That doesn’t make me want to say “I told you so.”  It makes me feel tired.  So this is a reminder that we all need to weigh the worth of what we do with our hearts—life is work no matter what it is.  It isn’t up to someone to determine the value of what we do.  Only we know that value in our hearts.  But we need to know what we do is worth it in order to continue to pursue the vision we hold.  If we get lost along the way, we may need to break again and start to rebuild—and that’s ok.  That’s the arduous nature of getting what we want.  It’s a refining, a redefining, a recreation of what we thought we wanted.  Some days are easier than others because the vision is clearer.  Some days we have to sift through the dust a bit more until we see what we’re working with.  Either way, don’t let the rubble get in our way.  The diamond is still in there.

“Did you think when you asked for expansion and a better life, that it was just going to be easy?  Did you think it would come without challenge?  Did you think that when you asked for more you weren’t going to be met with less to see if you still wanted to choose more? Did you think that when you asked for love you weren’t going to be me with opportunities to not be loving so you could choose love?  You asked for growth and so the universe is giving you opportunities for you to grow.  Did you think they would look easy? Tale as old as time babe, diamonds are made under pressure.  How you show up, how you react, how you respond in the moments when It is not easy to respond and not align in that heart opened, heart centered way, that’s when it matters.  You asked for expansion so you’re getting contraction so you can continue expanding.  Keep going,” Vanessa Fontana.  I want to caveat this with the fact that there is a difference between hard/challenging versus hard/not worth it because the truth is about mindset.  If we tell ourselves things are a struggle then it will be a struggle to get there and it will always be more effort than the return.  If we understand the challenge is about learning something then the effort is worth it.

Like every venture we undertake there will always be unknowns—there is no way to understand/predict every facet of what a certain goal entails because, even those with the same goals, have different paths and challenges to get there.  It’s naïve to think that everything will be effortless, even if it’s aligned with our authentic self/true purpose.  Even the good stuff takes work.  The key is knowing when the juice is worth the squeeze and whether the type of challenge presented is worth continuing to do more.  We are the only ones who can make that decision.  The truth is no one is owed anything, even the things meant for us.  At the very least we must put in the effort to align with our calling.  The other truth in this matter is the universe ALWAYS knows the truth.  Like, we can say we want to be a writer or a pod caster or say we want to help people but if we don’t do the work required to achieve those things, it will never happen and it will always feel like the odds are stacked against us. Also, we may be saying we want to be or do a certain thing but that isn’t what we really feel inside.  The universe will 100% throw challenges our way if we’re trying to do something that isn’t for us—even if we think we’re doing it for the right reasons like saying we want to take over the family business because we “should” so we go through the motions but we know deep down we want to be doing something else.  The universe will make it feel awful inside even if it looks like a smooth transition on the surface.

Even if you/we don’t believe we chose this assignment prior to arriving here on Earth, the fact is, once we are here, everything we choose is 100% our choice.  Sure there are things we are guided toward, things we are shaped for through our environment, but whatever we ultimately do with our time and our lives is our choice.  That doesn’t mean we are alone in figuring everything out but it does mean that we are responsible for altering the course when we feel something isn’t working or isn’t aligned.  It does mean that we have to accept the responsibility that comes with those choices and sometimes we have to clean up our own messes.  Creation isn’t always pretty and I’ve said it before—creation means the destruction of what we knew and the act of destruction is always messy.  We must be prepared to put the pieces back together into the new version, whatever it is.  That means we need to have a vision of what the new IS.  That takes the time to flip all those little broken pieces over and see what they are so we can form the new picture out of the puzzle.  And that’s the beautiful thing: the new is always present in the old.  We’re taking the pieces of ourselves that still matter in the creation of the new—we never really leave all of ourselves behind, just the parts that no longer serve.  So keep going even when we feel broken.  Rest, but keep digging through the ask to find what the new version is asking of us and soon, piece by piece, that new life is built and the transformation is complete.  That takes work.  But it’s the most beautiful work if we can stick with it. 

Today I am grateful for messing up.  I missed posting yesterday.  I feel like there was something in the air that brought me to that moment—perhaps that I’d put it out to the universe myself.  I love my writing but this has been a challenge to keep up with over the last few months.  There have been so many times I just wanted to stop and focus on something else, so many times I questioned if this little piece of work was worth the stress of keeping up that posting streak. I knew I wasn’t doing it all the justice it deserved by forcing myself to post every day just for the sake of posting.  Some of my pieces weren’t my best, they barely made sense even to me.  But I was more worried about keeping my streak going than I was about quality content.  I’d mentioned the other day I’d thought about what would happen if I just decided to stop for a while because I knew I needed a break and I knew I needed time to create a better thought out piece of work..  I got distracted yesterday and truly thought I’d had that post scheduled.  When I logged in today, I saw that I never scheduled the piece.  It was done, just not scheduled. 

Today I am grateful for boundaries.  Forgetting to post yesterday forced me to take some time to really categorize and focus on what’s important.  Normally I give in to every little distraction while I’m working because I want to get the distraction out of the way.  What that’s really telling the universe is that I’m prioritizing anything that crosses my path over what I’ve been saying I really want to do.  Because I forgot to schedule a few things, I needed to ignore the distraction of the animals and even my husband and son. And it was ok to do that.  I don’t ignore the needs of those I love often or lightly but this was a scenario where productive thought needed to be tackled in that moment and doing so, doing the work when I was inspired and ready to do the work, made it flow so much easier than stopping in the middle of it and then trying to pick back up again.  It’s ok to do the work that needs to be done even if it doesn’t make sense to others.  There are always ways to figure it out—and no one died for having to wait an extra 30 minutes for some attention.

Today I am grateful for boundaries.  A continuation on the boundaries mentioned above but from a different angle.  With my career change from last June, it’s been easy to get distracted and fall in the trap of working nearly 24/7.  When I’m on call I do in fact work 24/7 for a week straight.  I work from home now so I’m ALWAYS connected to the job.  Sure, in these past 8 months I’ve learned what actually needs to be prioritized (it was so easy in the beginning to think everything was an emergency) but it’s also as easy to fall into the habit of, “This will only take a minute, just get it done.”  So, fully aware I did it to myself, and fully knowing I needed to stop and take some time off (I’ve got nearly 5 weeks of vacation from my previous role and my transition into this one), I knew it was time for a day off.  I had a doctor’s appointment so I put in for the entire day off on Friday.  One day didn’t change everything for me, but it showed me that maintaining boundaries around my time and taking the time to clearly focus on something else that needed addressing is crucial.  I’d been pushing and pushing and persisting and exhausting myself to get it all done and thinking I had no reason to complain about being tired because I have all the time in the world to do what I need to do—but no one is designed to be “on” 24/7/365.  So, recognizing I’m not super woman nor is that the expectation because I work from home helped.  I am able to work from home because I’m expected to have a different availability than other people—that doesn’t mean I’m expected to work 24/7/365.  We all need to recharge and I’m allowed to do what’s necessary to do just that.

Today I am grateful for fun.  Ok, this isn’t new and I’ve talked about the importance of taking time for fun a lot but there are moments (like what I mentioned in the boundaries section above) where fun is the last thing on my mind or I feel like I’m supposed to be “on” all the time.  My heart has been crying for fun for a long time.  Like, I have this vision of such a balanced life with work, play, my own projects, a clean house, a loving family, vacations, work that means something to me and supports us, etc. etc. but I put so much focus on my job to prove I’ve earned my time off, to prove to those around me that I work too, that I lost sight of how to even have fun.  Even the nights I’d be in the basement with my husband trying to play a game of pool or darts, I’d been entirely distracted by something else or I’d take the game itself so seriously (like having to do it well to prove I’m a worthy partner or some crap like that) that I still wouldn’t be able to have fun.  I WASN’T having fun.  So we went the full opposite this weekend.  We went shopping (and probably spent more than we should have) but it was for things we always wanted but never took the time to bring into the house.  It was for experiences together as a family that we normally don’t do.  It felt amazing.  The point is if we are going to play, we need to play.  It isn’t about the result of the play in terms of who wins/loses—it’s about letting go of the result and taking the time to bond. And on top of all that, today is the Super Bowl and we love watching football so we’re taking the time to enjoy the game together as a family (from home, of course 😊).

Today I am grateful for cleansing.  There had been such a negative energy around me that, as I mentioned in the play section above, I couldn’t even let go just to have a good time.  The play never felt fulfilling and it felt like more and more of a waste of time as we tried to do it nightly.  We’d scheduled the time together to do something different, to get off our butts from watching TV and to actually do something together—something we’d wanted to do together for a long time which is why my husband had worked on rebuilding that pool table in the first place.  I digress.  The energy surrounding the house and ourselves was thick and painful.  Always heavy and difficult to walk through and it was so heavy that it made even the things we WANTED to be doing unnecessarily challenging and painful.  So I took the time to sage ourselves and the entire house last night and it was amazing.  There’s still some stuck energy here so I want to go through and physically clean the house as well, but cleansing was the start of something amazing for us.  I could feel the attachment to being angry and resentful because I didn’t feel like the “play” was worth anything more than a waste of time.  So, cleansing to detach from the stigma of play and work, to clear the stagnation from all that negativity of the last year, to create a clean and safe place for my family and I to enjoy our time together felt amazing.  We still have work to do, but it feels like an amazing start.  We will keep going and removing the pieces that hold us back until we find where we’re supposed to be—and I know we are getting there. Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.         

We’re often asked as children what we want to be when we grow up.  I don’t know about any of you but when people asked me that, it always felt like they were somehow playing, like they wanted to play on the fanciful mind of a child, like there was no real vision or intent in the ideals or mind of a child.  I remember feeling like I had to play into that view of who the adults thought I was at the time and say things like, “I’m going to be a teacher” or “I’m going to be an astronaut.”  I never felt like there was any real curiosity on how I felt.  I also never really learned to connect with those pieces of me that would have told me what I wanted.  Maybe some of the other kids my age knew what they wanted and it was just me who felt like I had to say what was expected, maybe some kids found their way later in life.  Perhaps the question was genuine and this is how adults wanted to learn how to guide kids.  But the problem with asking kids what they want to be at a young age is twofold: we either create a stigma where kids feel like they have to commit to what they say or we don’t take into account that kids are fickle and change their minds.  I don’t know why we’re so obsessed as a society with defining people as early and often as possible.  The truth is simple: We’re allowed to outgrow the version of ourselves that we thought we’d become.

Humans are ever evolving, ever changing, ever expanding creatures and, while we like to categorize and label things as soon as we can, it isn’t always the most practical thing—or the most honest.  We are not one thing.  On top of that we train ourselves to ignore all the little moments thinking it’s only the big moments that matter.  Like all this life happens in between these milestones—the milestone is great but it took all of that in between to get there—that’s an entire existence.  The truth is, most humans live multiple versions of themselves—our lives are a constant rebirth from one version to the next.  Who we are one minute isn’t necessarily who we are the next and instead of running from identity to identity or torching everything we were to the ground, we need to integrate all those pieces that resonate with who we are and let the rest go.  We are all those things.  And I want to emphasize that our life isn’t quantified or qualified by how big we get, how big our house or bank account is, or by the size of the vision—our life is determined by how well we live.  The same dream and goals don’t apply to everyone and we don’t all need to have our names written on the screens when we are already made of stars.  It’s also ok to play our little part in something big because this life is big enough.

So perhaps that is the point I’ve been trying to make for years, in piece after piece I’ve written: that we are enough.  The insane pressure of consumerism, of capitalism, of whatever-the-hell-we-have-to-haveism is too much.  There have been so many advances in this world since the dawn of time that we are likely closer to the imagined science fiction than we are to what time was like back then.  There is a lot to see, a lot to do, a lot of possibility and opportunity in this world so I find it really disappointing that, for the sake of making other people comfortable with who we are and to allow the world to somehow keep track of us, we need to define ourselves in a way that makes people happy.  And what if they don’t agree with it?  I say who the hell cares.  This life could literally be taken away fro many of us at any moment so why are we so concerned with making people perceive us a certain way?  Especially when the human mind perceives experientially anyway?  I don’t care what my kid wants to be 30 years from now.  I’m not saying to not have a goal—and for those kids who DO know definitively what they want, that’s great—however, that goal needs to be kept in context of LIFE, not life.  LIFE is all the things we ever want to do, to create, and explore, and as cute as it is to hear that 5 year old talk about how they’re going to be a CEO one day, they won’t know that until they’re older.  Let life happen, be honest, and don’t be afraid to be whatever part you’re meant to be. It isn’t always what we thought it would be–and that’s fine.    

People run for different reasons—exercise, competition, creativity, to win, to get somewhere, to leave somewhere.  There are a lot of reasons to run and a lot of ways to run as well.  We take things head on or we avoid them, and if we’re honest, we can see we’ve all done it.  Whether it’s something we can’t stop talking about or something we never bring up, we’re running in a specific direction and running means we’re anywhere but where we are in the moment.  We can’t escape the moment no matter how uncomfortable. Thinking you can escape life is the problem—we can never escape life.  Life is all the moments that happen when we’re working toward something and we can’t get to where we’re going without being in the moments happening right now. 

Transition and transformation are far from simple things—even though some changes are easier than others.  The act of taking away what once was and building something new takes a lot and sometimes it’s a matter of building something only we can see.  Avoiding what it takes to get there will never get us there.  Change is messy and chaotic and even ugly at times but avoiding the work required delays the results—and those results have a way of finding us regardless of what we do.  Change is about persistence and perseverance as well as purpose and passion.  Sometimes the pieces of our past need to be dealt with to pave the way for the future we’ve been envisioning. 

Sometimes when we least expect it we become exactly what we were trying to be.   Suddenly we wake up and we’ve transformed into the life we always wanted.  The things we struggled with make sense.  The routine shifts and what seemed daunting is effortless.  There are no more tests, we’ve stopped running and we embrace the life we live.  As hard as it may be, I want to add that sometimes it takes a loss to remind us of what we always were.  The things that no longer serve, the job that falls apart, the doors that seem to stay closed no matter how hard we push—all those things guide us to what we want.  More importantly, they guide us to what we need to get what we want.  So all of this is to say that we need to stop running—we may think we’re running for our health but we’ve been avoiding the truth.  We need to slow down to see where we’re at.  And sometimes where we’re at is exactly where we need to be.   

None of us are defined by one thing.  Sure there’s an overarching theme where we can kind of get the general idea of who someone is, but there are so many pieces to what makes a person.  With that being said, sometimes there are facets of who we are that don’t quite seem to fit together or we aren’t sure how to make them fit together.  Like we have this calling toward things that may seem polar opposites but we feel pulled to them.  Sometimes it takes a bit more work to flip the pieces or move them in a new direction, but rest assured that if the pieces fall to us, we are meant to put them together to create the full picture of our lives. I received this reminder while watching a behind the scenes of a vlog we watch regularly, and it was a perfect example of how we can merge multiple things together and it just works.  This business was a mix of Japanese, BBQ, Coffee, and a Grocery/Restaurant.  My initial reaction was along the lines that it was too much, they were trying to put too much together and it was such an obscure mix of things that didn’t seem to make sense, even to me.  But the more I watched, the more I saw that owner is making it work with putting all of that together.  Sometimes unrelated things that don’t seem to make sense on paper actually work in real life.  This was a great reminder to keep working on finding how those pieces fit together because there’s a way.  It isn’t always obvious but keep shuffling the pieces and eventually we’ll see the whole thing.

Continuing on our discussion of light and life that comes from the rubble of certain experiences, I had a moment when I realized it wasn’t until things really started to fall apart that I understood there were things that needed to change.  Like, I didn’t know what needed to change until it started to change.  I’ve been working on the ever-evolving process of self-development and embracing who I am so I always thought I had a good grasp on what needed to be done even if I wasn’t doing it perfectly. In looking back there were signs that I wasn’t always on the right track/what I was doing wasn’t working.  I mean, every time I faced a trigger I was aware of, the automatic response was the same as it always had been, the same stories running through my mind all the time.  That should have been a cue that things weren’t working out as I had planned and perhaps needed to try another way.  But then things really took a turn.  Like, I started losing people again.  People around me got sick. Mental health in those I love took a severe decline, my mental health took a decline. I saw a future without specific elements in my life and my heart broke. I felt overwhelmed and lost and confused and alone.  Those moments when there was so much that needed to be done that I didn’t know where to begin, all that overwhelm, I was ready to throw it all away because the pressure felt too great. 

Then I heard this song reminding me that sometimes the answer isn’t throwing it all away, it’s finding the pieces that were hidden behind the façade we built.  Some walls hold up the structure and others hide things, even if we don’t intend for that.  Sometimes we thought we were protecting something and we build a wall we never intended to exist and we end up building an entire life on something that can’t hold up.  When those walls start to fall, when we stand the initial rubble, it feels even more chaotic and lost.  Sure, it feels like we’re losing something and it can be painful, but it wasn’t meant to exist like that in the first place.  Seeing all the underlying cracks and recognizing what had already fallen apart was terrifying because it shone a spotlight on all I knew could still fall apart, on all I could still lose.  I needed to focus on what had potential to be built.  To say that there was a point and a time where it made sense to live a certain way and now it was over didn’t mean that we weren’t supposed to be that way at that time and it doesn’t mean we aren’t supposed to live how we are now.  It doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong when we get to a point where we have nowhere else to go but through.  It’s finding the pieces that shine within the rubble.  This house isn’t necessarily falling apart but there is something missing.  The light and the life. 

Seeing what I loved fall apart, my husband’s health, the house with the cracks in the ceiling.  Like every move we make is just taking it closer to breaking brought about every old fear I had about losing the people I love, the same fear I’ve had since I was a child, losing all the people who cared most about me.  I couldn’t think straight–  Maybe this is one of those moments I’ve spoken of where it’s meant to break.  Perhaps this isn’t something I’m meant to fix.  Perhaps all the chaos is just a signal letting us know we need to do something different, that something is at its end even if it didn’t turn out how we wanted it to. The truth is there are certain facets of life that we simply have no control over and not everything turns out how we thought it would.  What we thought was amazing turns out to be crap for lack of a better word.  What once was shiny is dull and cracked, what once held light is now a black hole, sucking our energy trying to bring us with it.  There comes a point where we have to realize that making the outside look pretty doesn’t change a damn thing going on inside and it is falling apart.  If the studs are breaking it doesn’t matter what color you paint the walls.  So when the body is screaming that something doesn’t fit, listen.  If something isn’t working anymore, pay attention.  The things in our lives are meant to fit us and our needs—we aren’t meant to conform.  So find our space in this world, allow what needs to fall apart to do so with dignity and grace and look for the light that comes with it. 

Late morning sun flooded through the windows bringing some much needed light into the cold grey room, lighting up my ceiling and walls and floor.  I’d been in a moment of fixation so my eye scrutinized the room more than normal, feeling lost in my head, unsure what I was even doing in that moment, and then my gaze really stuck on a particular part of the room where the light reflected brightest.  My heart caught as I saw new cracks on the ceiling from the continued settling of the house through the freezing, brutal winter.  A surge of absolute desperation, anger, frustration, and helplessness flowed through me and I screamed to no one that I didn’t want to live here any longer.  That feeling encompassed what seemed the ever growing truth that there was no point in continuing to try and make something work that clearly didn’t.  No matter what we tried to do there were always new cracks and they were getting bigger and bigger, harder to maintain, harder to fix.  We’ve been in this home for 5 years and it is only about 13 years old so we’d expected some of the issues we’ve had and we’ve done some improvements but it seemed the life I envisioned for us here wasn’t happening.  Seeing those new cracks felt like the last bit of hope I had after a terrible season were ripped away, a reminder that there were still issues underlying the pretty façade we’ve built.  I’d made it through a tough time only to have it thrown right back in my face.  I was ready to throw it all away in that instant.  There was no motivation or hope in that moment to put anything else/any other energy into what we had around us.

I really started to think about it because I’ve habitually held onto things that have no hope because I’ve desperately wanted it all to work out, to feel some sense of security in it working out—in short, codependence on what is familiar.  What good was that doing?  Every time something else pops up, it’s exhausting.   It doesn’t feel like an opportunity to pivot, it feels like another drain on my energy.  So if all of this energy to make things look and feel a certain way was falling apart, if it didn’t turn out how I thought it would, why keep going?  There could be another way:  Instead of the struggle to keep things from breaking and tearing myself apart in the process, what would I be willing to let fall apart?  Stop thinking the energy spent keeping things together is worth more than letting it die in its time.   If something is determined to break, there is nothing we can do to stop it and we can either spend our entire lives trying to stop that freight train or we can jump off to preserve what we have now.  For me, it’s preserving that time with family and establishing my own career, my own legacy doing what I want to do—no one will ensure I get the life I want to for myself but myself.  Building a house on sand is dangerous and covering up all the cracks with more mud will eventually create a mound of crap instead of a sturdy foundation.  We need to discern between the moment we need to keep patching and the moment we need to do a complete tear down.       

That moment of desperation, of wanting to destroy everything, was the culmination of losing the people and things that gave me any sense of security—from my parent’s health issues, to adjusting an on call schedule at my 9-5, to my husband’s unexpected health issues, to the loss of long time family friends—now my very home seemed to be turning against me.  The universe is determined and offers painful, albeit true/necessary lessons in life including the fact that if we are staying stuck, the universe will find a way to make us move including removing what felt like security.  Sometimes we need to move faster, we need to move through uncomfortable crap, and sometimes we need to let go of what we thought we wanted in order to find what we need.  Not that we have to throw it away or destroy it but we can’t fight the inevitable.  As fate would have it, I heard a line in a show that said “In the ruins, it’s more alive and beautiful because of what it’s been through.”  We can’t tailor our lives to make other people happy, we don’t need to throw it all away when it gets tough.  Sometimes it’s about finding the pieces that shine within the rubble.  The house isn’t falling apart but there is something missing and those cracks are showing me what needs to be put back together.  The house needs light and life and joy.  It doesn’t need to be demolished and we may need to admit that this isn’t the place for us, but it isn’t time to throw away anything we’ve built.  Sure, at some point we may move on from this place and start somewhere new—that’s life.  Sometimes we see the potential in those cracks, the new life rising from the ashes—and sometimes we have to remember that a crack doesn’t necessarily mean the end, it’s where the life comes in.  The cracks show we’ve lived—or remind us that we have more living to do, because life can be born of those cracks.