Today I am grateful for reminders of what is important.  We had a birthday party the other day and there were so many lessons.  1. Getting older truly is a gift because not everyone makes it.  Not everyone gets that much life.  If we can approach a certain age with health, love, and joy, we are blessed. 2.  Do not take our health for granted, not even for a second.  Do whatever we can to care for ourselves.  3. Not everyone lives their life the same way and we are all simply doing our best.  We do what we think is right—there are no instruction manuals in this game and all we can do is keep trying.  We need to treat each other with a little more grace and respect because sometimes the person who offers a hand is the last person you’d expect—and you never know when you need that hand. 4.  There is so much joy and beauty in simplicity and presence.  Sometimes all we need is an acknowledgement of love, or to step outside and climb some rocks, touch a tree.  When our brains move too quickly, we need to find a way to slow down and come back to presence. 5. Sometimes the people who show you they care, even when you think they’ve forgotten about you, are the last ones you’d expect.  It doesn’t need to be a big show, but it is so important to feel included, acknowledged, and loved, to know that our existence matters.  6. Take the damn pictures and enjoy every fucking moment no matter what.  No matter what.  Capture that moment and cherish it, and always be present.      

Today I am grateful for both surviving and thriving.  I try to spend time in gratitude every day because I am well aware of the importance of each moment in this life but the truth is sometimes you have to survive in order to thrive, to appreciate what you have.  For a long time I never understood some of the people in a certain person’s life.  I see now the appeal of the people in his life—he fought to prove his existence his entire life in everything he did (which he never had to do but he felt that) and these people don’t bat an eye to open their arms.  They’ve taught him to slow down and find value in the moment.  Take the picture, be happy and we don’t constantly have to work on proving ourselves—we are allowed to have fun and enjoy our lives.  Life doesn’t have to be that serious and even if we make a mistake, we are human and we learn…and we move on.  A mistake doesn’t need to be held over someone’s head for years.  The people in my family who always created that sense of needing to prove are on different spectrums now. Some see the value in life as it is—or they are at least awakening to it while others are still trying to control life, place value on certain people, and judgement if things aren’t exactly how they think it should be.  We only get so much time and we can spend it living, learning, and applying or we can stick in a moment and let life stagnate until that moment becomes what we think it should be.  I choose the latter.   

Today I am grateful for being able to return a favor.  It really does feel good to give back.  We are incredibly blessed to have some super loving and generous neighbors.  We aren’t always able to return the level of generosity they have (for various reasons) and sometimes it makes me feel really anxious (talk about needing to prove myself).  One of my gifts is being able to pick up on when people are in distress or out of sorts or just not ok.  The other day I was keenly aware that one of them was in total disarray mentally.  I immediately took stock of the situation and let her speak and she shared some very similar things to my circumstances—attention constantly divided, needing to take care of everyone around you, unable to articulate thoughts because you can’t finish a sentence even if you know what you want to say, feeling obligated (or actually being obligated) to take care of to take care of everyone but yourself.  I took steps to give her what I could, to provide resources with what I had and I could see the relief in her.  It felt amazing and reminds me of the actual work I want to be doing, the type of impact that I want to have on the world.    

Today I am grateful for new opportunities.  Today we are going to attend a conference for our business and I feel like I am on the precipice of something.  There has been a lot of emotion over the last several months, surrounded by confusion—some of it self-created, some of it from too much stimulation—but all of it has left me feeling drained and confused about which way to go next.  I understand now that this isn’t the narrative I want to keep repeating so I know that I will need to make a decision soon.  I am grateful to have the opportunities that are coming my way, and I am even more grateful that I have a choice amongst them.  As hard as it is to not see the end, I can’t be upset that I’m not clairvoyant or all-powerful to see the end of the circumstance.  And the reality is that the end is the end—I don’t want to have to rush through my life to get there SO, the point is that I simply need to make a decision and trust it is the right one.  Trust that all the opportunities that are meant for me will come my way and that my life is unfolding as it should.  Stop keeping my life on pause because I don’t see farther down the road.  Enjoy the moment, make a decision based on what feels right, and let go of the rest.    

Today I am grateful for remembering myself.  I’ve been in the corporate world for a really long time and I’ve been leaning more and more toward taking myself too seriously.  I don’t feel connected to anyone around me at times in regard to getting things done.  The list of what we “need” to do is getting longer and longer and treated with less and less appreciation and we have to do it with less people.  I’ve felt like the only way to survive in that environment is to be a machine and just churn out the work.  It’s an incredibly overwhelming feeling.  Sometimes when we are letting go of what we know it feels like we are doing something wrong.  We feel this pull to do what we feel is familiar whenever we try something new.  I know I personally get this sinking feeling in my stomach, like I’m incredibly uncomfortable.  But I know that I need to start embracing the unknown and start working more toward those things until they become familiar too.  And then I go on to the next adventure.  It’s about knowing what works for me and doing what’s right—for me, what feels right. 

Today I am grateful for being busy.  The last week has been super overwhelming—I have a lot on my plate at work because I am down an entire department and I’ve been working with my child as he is back in school, and I have all of these projects at home in addition to things like birthdays and conventions.  It’s been overwhelming and I literally didn’t know what to prioritize first.  But the truth is this: being busy means there is action in my life, there are steps forward, there are things to do.  I have the ability to say yes to things I want and no to things I don’t want.  I am blessed with things to do, I am blessed with choices, I am blessed with people who support me to do new things.  I am blessed to be supported by people who sometimes struggle to know what it is they want.  Being busy means that I have choices—I can be busy doing what I think is right or I can be busy working on the things I want to.  Making the transition is scary, but I am learning to rely on my own steps every day.  It’s not perfect, but I have the ability to do it.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.