Imagination and innovation aren’t limited to certain hours of the day.  I can’t remember where I heard this but it stuck with me as I’m trying to pin down my goals and put them on a calendar so I can check all the boxes toward what I want.  I have a schedule that I know will help me get where I want to be but my brain isn’t always operating on that clock.  Like right now I should have been working on these pieces but I had somethings to navigate through so I ended up writing about something else.  And I have to get ready for work in about 20 minutes so I’m already “failing” at meeting the planned schedule I have—and the more I let myself veer away from that schedule, I get further away from the goal and I feel guilty at myself for not keeping my word.  I limit myself to the hours I have set but the truth is imagination and innovation aren’t limited to certain hours of the day.  Sometimes what I want to do doesn’t jive with what I have written down but I know if I don’t follow it in the moment, I will lose the thought.  If we operate under the premise that we aren’t limited to certain hours of the day, it makes it easier to pick up where we left off.  Maybe we don’t put in as much time on a certain project when we had it planned, but if it was meaningful time spent then we still made progress—and progress is the real goal. 

So where do structure and creativity blend?  I need to have focus but I need to have the freedom to create—this is true for all of us.  And perhaps I need some guidance with prioritizing and sticking with my plans.  Perhaps I don’t know it all and there are other avenues I need to consider toward reaching my goals. This is where ego comes in and I’m still too naïve thinking I understand people.  I don’t always like reaching out for help because it has often been the case where I don’t get the help I need or people take over.  The truth is I will never understand what it is to put ourselves ahead of others so much that we hurt other people and tell them to deal with it.  Where does ego stop and genuine hurt begin?  And when is the self-sacrifice so much that it verges on martyrdom?  I’m not sure but I know creativity and relationships are tied together because we have to prioritize and weave relationships and our need for expression together.  I know that I want complete freedom of expression and creative flow and in order to do that, I need to let go of control—but if I don’t control certain facets of what I’m doing and narrow down the focus, nothing will get done.  And we have this beautiful range of time—we aren’t limited by anything other than what we set—I have 24 hours in a day the same as anyone else—I don’t need to quadrant off my time so much so that it stifles parts of me—and people don’t get to tell me how to feel.

I think we all live multiple lives because we are trying to figure out what we are meant to do—perhaps it’s that we are trying to figure out who we are.  And in order to find the right place, the right skin, we often have to try on different things.  We don’t know if it fits until we try it on.  I think at the end of the day what we want scares us as much as it thrills us.  As much as we desire it we fear it.  And that has a lot to do with the unknown—we are used to what we have around us, all that is here is a result of what we were thinking anyway.  And that is a result of what we KNOW.  There is so much more to know out there so we have to eventually step out of our space in order to create more space.  Even if it’s something as simple as giving up a habit so we can focus on establishing something new.  It’s scary but it’s worth it because the fact is this: everything that is unknown has the potential to be known but we can’t get there until we take the first step, no matter how small.  All of the limits we see in the world are a matter of our perception.  We can change them and break free at any time. Creativity and inspiration hit when they are meant to even if it feels like an inconvenient time.  We have now and we can’t control when we receive the influence/inspiration.  But we can choose how we perceive it and what we do with it.  Speaking from experience, say and do what is needed in the moment otherwise we stack the deck against ourselves.  Creativity and inspiration are meant to flow and I want to relish in the full force of it.    

“We weren’t as happy as they were in earlier decades, but we were happy.  We made love and fell asleep to this song in the 90’s and woke up today; what a time machine music can be,” unknown.  I have a little bit of a nostalgia post.  In reconciling the need to live my life all the way up, without restraint, and honoring the work my entire lineage did before me, I have a moment to discuss.  I see all the work they did and how they had the same feelings I have about wanting to do something else and be something more and I see how they consistently held themselves back.  I was listening to some music from my younger days and now people my age are coming back to it and making comments like the ones listed above.  And I suddenly feel even more connected to my parents and what happens as we get older.  Suddenly we feel our youth slipping away like our trajectory is taken out of our own hands and we are thrust on this path from someone else.  There is so much potential in youth and we spend so much time trying to stifle that in kids—I do the same thing to my son.  I want him to be respectful and listen and do what he’s told.  And, with the exception of the respect thing, why is that so important? 

I always did exactly what I was told and when I had to lie or manipulate to get what I really wanted I felt guilty.  Perhaps more accurately, I felt guilt at doing and being what I wanted to be and feeling it necessary to lie or manipulate to get what I wanted.  Why do we do that to our kids?  I don’t want my son to feel guilty for being himself because I felt guilt all the time.  I had this power, I FELT this power in me and I used to challenge adults as kids, but I couldn’t find my footing with those people my own age so I felt weak.  I felt like I couldn’t get anywhere with what I wanted to do.  WE always think the past was easier and better and I think I finally get it: there was ENDLESS potential in the past.  We hadn’t decided who we were, we FELT who we were and we did that without fear until we were told not to.  There is always a moment when we decide to give up who we are for who we are told to be.  And we live in conflict with that because we know we feel something else but our actions don’t support that.  Our entire history of humanity has been nothing but a giant experiment to figure out what works best as individuals and as a whole and we have found some really good points in time and we have some really dark moments.  It isn’t that we were happier, it’s that we had more options.  And options I guess do make us happier.

I often feel like I woke up and was this age without my knowledge or consent.  I have no idea how I got to this point where I have this house with an 8 year old and a 23 year old relationship.  I picked a course and couldn’t quite figure out how to get to where I wanted to be so I settled into a routine I felt I had control over, taking the safe steps toward what I thought I wanted, trying to control how it would happen.  The more I controlled the less options I had.  And then those decisions became my life.  Truly I’m not complaining about any of it because I am so blessed and fortunate.  It’s just scary how we can live a life without really living it.  I’m working to heal that and bring back the options I had when I was younger.  The truth is they are still there and no, it won’t look exactly how I thought it would.  I don’t have the kids I thought I would, I don’t have the money secured exactly as I thought I would, we no longer have the family business and we have lost people along the way.  But there are still glimmers.  I’ve held so tightly to a vision for so long that I wasted time I could have just done something else and gotten the result sooner but I was so attached to what I saw that I couldn’t let it go.  And now it’s happening to a degree and it feels good, but it also feels like I could have had it a long time ago if people had just played ball.  Like if this is where we were going to end up like I called it, why didn’t we just do it sooner? And overall we are happy. I’m happy.  There are a lot of amazing things happening and even greater things are coming with attention and focus.  So we don’t have to go back to how it used to be—we can create that level of safety and desire to be here and now.  That is how we heal: be here now.  We appreciate the past but we live where we are.

“My own work of art, here where I stand,” Toby Lightman.  This was a song I heard years ago and I loved it then and for whatever reason it recently popped back up for me.  But this simple line is something I needed to hear.  I have made a ton of progress over the last year and I still feel shaky about it, like it can be taken away.  Like I don’t want to fall into old habits and go back to how I was but I feel myself slipping every now and then.  And I have so many goals, so many irons in the fire, with open projects and things that I’ve started that I can’t (and don’t want to) stop that I feel a little all over the place.  I’ve been working really hard on keeping the organization up and ramping it up to a higher level and I’ve been planning more specific details of what I want to do—clarifying and specifying the goals.  And when I see that I feel a little overwhelmed. 

Here’s the thing, I am beyond privileged to be in the position I’m in and I do not take it for granted for a second.  But when we take control of our lives and we suddenly are transitioning to a new way of living, it can be scary as hell.  It’s intimidating and it’s very easy, especially in the beginning stages of the rubber meeting the road, when we get some traction, to fall back into old habits.  It’s a constant test of asking what is it that we really want.  If we are trying to change then we need to match the action to that desired outcome.  I’m lucky that I have the means and energy to make the changes I want to make.  I’ve decided that I am breaking away from the past and I am doing something new, I am creating something new and I am healing the old patterns.  And that in itself is art.  The person I am meant to be is art. 

Even art needs to be refined every now and then and there is nothing wrong with that.  I still have moments of intensely feeling behind the times, like I should have started all of this sooner and that I should be further on my journey.  But I am here now and all I can do is work with what I have.  I allow my brain to live in fear of what I’ve missed and that is where I have to learn to accept that I am where I’m meant to be.  This life is perfectly as it is meant to be.  I had a moment while working on my book where I felt almost existential, I could feel myself going out of my body comparing my life to that of my parents.  I always thought they had it so together and were so much more mature than me, that they knew what they were doing all the time.  I never considered they were my age and probably felt just as insecure and unsure.  And it’s that insecurity that keeps us on the fence.  So, that too, is a pattern I’m breaking—I’m diving in.

Life is a creation and it is a work of art and we are handed all the raw materials to make something of it.  We should never be ashamed of what we make or how we feel or the direction we are called.  We are meant to honor the art we are and the life we make.  We are meant to be proud of our creation.  I held back so many facets of my life because I didn’t want to get too big.  I wanted to be accepted.  And now I have enough understanding that I was always meant to be big and that people felt it, even when I was a kid, that I understood things differently.  I didn’t see the obstacles—if I wanted something I saw the way to do it and I did it.  I’m not saying it always worked out, but I am saying for all those times that didn’t work out, I was the reason.  My brain stopped me, my fear stopped me, my doubt stopped me—I was the biggest obstacle.  Had I unleashed all I was earlier, I would have learned to harness it and direct that power.  That’s true for all of us.  So don’t be afraid to live with our art turned all the way up.  The world needs that now more than ever—live life completely turned up.

You are what you repeat…whether it’s what you think, say, feel, and do.  Believe it or not I saw this on the lid of my breakfast the other day, which, for the record, was a really nice way to start the day.  As we’ve been working through some changes in the house that we unexpectedly had to tackle (now instead of later), coupled with the changes (very unexpected changes) at work that I’ve shared, I feel like we need this reminder that our thoughts determine our reality.  How many thoughts do we repeat day in and day out?  When looking at our current circumstances, what do we see?  Do we see the positive manifestation of what we have done or do we fixate on what isn’t how we want it?  So here’s the thing:  I’ve been begging for changes in both my work and home for a really long time.  These have come about in ways I wouldn’t have chosen myself but the events have still brought the changes that I ultimately asked for.  The universe responds to energy—it doesn’t care about the how, it just responds to the frequency and it brings about the result. 

So when we look at the picture of our life as it is right now, what do we see?  How do we feel about what we see?  And what do we want to see?  There is a saying that what we have around us we thought about years ago.  What we have now is the result of our thoughts we used to think.  Sidenote, I feel like this is why we have a tendency to dismiss the present because we are so used to instant gratification that when we recognize we received something we wanted a long time ago, it has sort of lost its luster because we are no longer in that moment.  Anyway.  It’s like the light of the stars—we aren’t seeing that real time, we are seeing echoes of what used to be.  The universe takes time to catch up with our dreams.  It isn’t a wishing well.  Sometimes we are more tuned in and we are able to bring about our desired results more quickly, but usually we have to give it some time.  The universe doesn’t offer one-click results. 

The point is this: the universe will answer, always and without fail.  The universe responds to our thoughts.  And while the catchy phrase of our youth, “You are what you eat,” still sits with us and we refuse to change our habits, we need to recognize that the same message applies to our lives: we are what we repeat.  Everything in our lives is the result of a thought and an action (or inaction, or half-action).  We get what we give, we receive the energy we put out, and our results are based on the effort we put into something.  When we fixate and focus on something, the universe will pick up on it even if it takes time to deliver—but we are the ones responsible for our lives and what we see around us.  So.  If we aren’t getting the results we want, it’s time to look at our habits and what we are thinking and to make the changes.  We have control and the ultimate say in our results.  Take some time to evaluate.

I am grateful for the reminder that things change all the time and to have examples of what it looks like to accept life with grace.  I am also grateful to have examples of remembering what is important and that we can’t hold onto things thinking they will bring us back to where we want to be.  A woman I work with is in her 60’s and she and her girls have very little attachment to things—like she was able to get rid of ornaments that her children made and her girls didn’t want to hang onto them either.  She was able to give up the home she lived in nearly her entire marriage, the place where she created a family she is so in love with in order to build a new house and start over now.  I so admire that.  She is the example that things aren’t where we hold the memory, things aren’t important.  It is the life we create, is the presence in our life to create those memories and understand what joy is. 

I have been inspired by someone I follow on Instagram, specifically her house once again.  This page calls to me because she is able to do so many of the things I want to do. I am so intrigued with how the family operates and she does so many of the things I want to be doing like baking daily, like gardening, like working out, like home-schooling her kids when needed, like following the bible, like vlogging and spending time with her family, like going out and having fun being active whether it’s being on the beach or wakeboarding or snowboarding.  The parties she throws for her kids are epic, the holidays are beautiful.  Even when they do things differently, it’s still amazing.  Like this Christmas in Hawaii.  I have no idea how they managed to pull off what they did with all of the gifts and the Christmas Eve bag and the time with family.  It was another reminder that it isn’t the home or the place that holds the memory—we do.  We make the memory. 

I spent so much of my life attached to the places and the things thinking that is where my memory is.  That’s why it was always so difficult for me to let go of anything.  It’s why I still have a hard time letting go of certain things.  But I see there is real value in keeping things simple.  When we don’t crowd our space with things, we are better able to navigate through what we need. And I have another reminder today about what it looks like when we are fully supported and cared for by those around us-not just clearing out the physical mess but also the people who aren’t for us.  This is someone I follow on social media who went through a divorce and now she owns a small restaurant and does a podcast and it’s awesome to see how accepting all the pieces of herself has made her stronger and happier.  When she was losing what she built it hurt her, but she kept going and she is the better for it now.  So I’ve taken some time to continue the purge as we are in the thick of winter and I am looking toward Spring.  I’m finally accepting that it’s never too late to embrace change and let go of what doesn’t work, that we don’t need to fill our lives with stuff to feel fulfilled—time with those we love is truly the most important and that will create the way to our goal.  We don’t have to be one thing, we can be all things and we will find someone who supports that in us.  This is a letting go—and it’s all for the better.

“When people feel stuck it’s because they’re only using part of their capacity, part of their brain.  When people are hungry they change their life.  How do you get yourself to take new action?  You need new emotions,” Tony Robbins.  We get stuck when we are in the same routine, doing the same things, with the same stimulus every day.  Doing the same thing over and over again doesn’t allow for us to discover and explore new options for problem solving or new life experiences.  We repeat something like 90% of the same thoughts we had the day before—if we do that enough over time that means we establish some pretty firm grooves in the brain.  The same thing can be said with those emotions—if we allow ourselves to feel the same emotions over and over again and are trained to have certain reactions, we will continually respond the same way to similar circumstances.  When we feel the call/need to do something else, that is when the hunger starts to form.  We feel the potential for something else, an awareness of other possibilities sparks in us.  We start to reframe what we feel about things and we ask ourselves if that is what we really feel or if that is what we trained ourselves to feel.  When we feel differently, that perspective shifts, even if it’s the same circumstance again.  With new perspective, we can take a different approach because we see a new option.

We are meant for greatness.  It’s a simple fact that we have all the potential of the universe inside of us.  It’s also a simple fact that it’s up to us what we do with it.  There is the quip where we ask for a cake and spirit/God/Source gives us all the ingredients to make it, the cake doesn’t just appear.  The same is true with any facet of our lives.  If we get the call to try something new, whether a subtle nudge/reminder or the fabric of what we knew being torn, we need to breathe and acknowledge that we need to do something new, that there are other possibilities for us and perhaps the routine we currently follow isn’t honoring all that potential in us.  No one ever said we have to be great at everything, we just need to be great at being ourselves and if we are going to unlock that full potential, we need to have a bigger perspective.  We need to understand time and how we spend our days.  We need to be highly in tune with who we are so we have constant awareness of what is us versus what is a push from the outside.  We need to unlock the full potential of who we are through that connection to self, source, and then to the world around us.  We can’t be pushed by the world, we are meant to influence the world. 

It’s difficult to create that space in a world that demands constant attention and immediate decisions.  We place urgency on things that require none, and it gives us this sense of FOMO if we don’t respond immediately–so we act on impulse rather than instinct.  Those are two very different things.  An impulse is a reaction, often without thinking, whereas an instinct is a natural response from within.  Impulse seeks a quick fix and may feel like an instinct, but the impulse is fleeting whereas the instinct will always be the same.  For example, we see candy while we’re checking out at the store and we decide we need the sugar fix right then and there versus us seeing the candy and understanding we are tired and hungry and need to eat something we prepared at home.  Same thing as far as the need for food in the moment, but the impulse would have a quick, unhealthy solution whereas the instinct tells us to address the problem correctly, not just find instant gratification.  If we are going to elicit new responses from ourselves, we need to get to the feeling behind our current circumstances and then recognize how we want to feel.  It isn’t enough to want to feel it—we need to know how to embody it and become it.  We are never stuck—we are a little stagnate, and we can start the flow again.  How do you want to feel today? 

Today I am grateful for creating my identity.  I don’t need people around me who don’t want me around.  I’ve learned that lesson and embraced it entirely.  I so desperately wanted to be accepted my entire life—that is a huge premise I’ve shared over and over again in this pieces, on these pages.  But people have shown me who they are more often than not and I will always believe them from this point on.  Forming relationships is tough because the human dynamic is such that most of us still operate on some level of competition, trying to secure what is best for us, feeling like we don’t have enough to go around.  There is also ego.  People want to be the best simply to be the best.  In all of this, all we have, the only person who is with us through absolutely everything is ourselves.  It is critical to know who we are so we don’t lose ourselves in the mess of becoming what someone else thinks we should be.  Even the little things, like buying the art I like, the books I enjoy, the clothes I want to wear, how I want my house to look—all the way to deciding on the thoughtfulness I put into a relationship and recognizing when the relationship isn’t working.  Knowing who I am is critical (as it is for all of us).  I am grateful, as scared as I used to be, to stop thinking about what others think first.  I am grateful to embrace the entirety of who I am.  She’s much more powerful in that capacity versus making herself palatable.  I am me.   

Today I am grateful for understanding the difference between showing and telling.  I understand now that part of why I had so much difficulty explaining and articulating my feelings as a kid is because I was trying to make people feel a certain way—I was trying to make them understand.  Instead of just saying it, just feeling it, I wanted to use words that made them feel how I wanted them to feel.  I thought that was the only way they would understand.  I thought if they understood they wouldn’t want to make others feel that way.  I didn’t understand then that most people don’t operate on such an emotional level all the time.  I didn’t really consider it emotional, I just thought that was how people operated.  I thought everyone felt like I did at some point.  And maybe they do, but the point is they didn’t let those feelings run them.  They didn’t let the feeling make a decision for them and I couldn’t make them feel what I did.  So showing is the way.  No pretext, no preamble—just tell the story.  Just say the words and how the message resonates is out of our hands.  Our job isn’t to make sure people understand how we feel, it’s to attract those who feel how we do through shared experience.    

Today I am grateful for witnessing light.  The light is coming earlier and staying longer in the day.  As I type this the sun is rising.  There is so much life in the light.  It’s an awe inspiring thing to watch the light crawl over the Earth, waking it up. So gentle yet so persistent and powerful—it’s unstoppable.  It runs our lives and guides us where to be and when, how to flow with the seasons, how to flow throughout our day.  We aren’t meant to hide, to shy away from the light.  We are meant to bask in it.  In so many ways I’ve had the light turned on again.  I didn’t realize how much of my time I had spent in the dark.  It felt comfortable there.  There isn’t much reason to move in the dark, so it felt good to settle and curl up wherever I was, perhaps to into another world through a book or the TV.  But that isn’t reality.  I still love those moments, I savor them because there is something special in that too.  I understand on a different level that none of that is actually doing anything.  It’s cool to be inspired and want to have the results or live a life like we see whether on TV or in the books or on social media.  Unless we get out from under the rock, off of the couch, and step out into the light we will never get to do those things.  We have to embrace the gift of the light. 

Today I am grateful for limits.  I’ve been on the struggle bus when it came to getting things done for a while now.  I always relied on a sharp mind to get me from one thing to the next and to remember all I needed to do.  It would automatically get me organized—I mean I used to pride myself on that.  Sometimes the environment around me would get a little chaotic but I would always manage to get myself back where I needed to be.  My brain has felt like absolute mush over the last several months.  I was already stressing with the volume of work I needed to do and I allowed myself to slack in some regards because I wasn’t sure how to tackle some of it.  And then more got piled on so I created the perfect little storm and that turned me to a bunch of ducks going in different directions. I’m grateful, however, because there comes a point where we can’t keep saying yes.  We have to have a limit and we have to abide by it.  Our body and mind know and they give us warning signs—mine did. I wasn’t feeling excited about projects, I was confused, things were conflicting, and I didn’t know where to start—none of that is normal for me on a regular basis.  So I’m grateful for this because we have limits.  We all have that point where we need to say, “It’s enough,” and start tackling one thing at a time.  That’s all we can do anyway.  I used to pride myself on the multi-tasking and managing multiple machines at work while on the phone and indexing records all at the same time—people used to compliment me on it.  Now, I understand I can still do all of that but only in one arena.  I can’t do that in 10.  So.  Back to the drawing board with some limitations and expectations—and it’s ok.  I’m glad to do things well rather than desperately and half-assed.  To do what I need to do.

Today I am grateful for space.  It’s amazing how space and time give us perspective.  In the midst of an event it can be challenging to find the right answer because we are too emotionally invested, too close to the forest so to speak.  With time a lot of things can happen.  We can either calm down and realize it isn’t that big of a deal or we can realize that we don’t align any longer.  Or we realize the middle ground and we understand the compromise or that something wasn’t that important or we understand that changes need to be made.  Space itself lets us know how we really feel.  They say if something still bothers you after 24 hours, speak up within 48.  I think it’s good advice and I honestly it also believe it gives people the most accurate representation of our feelings.  I had an incident this past week where I told someone that I wasn’t happy with their behavior and their response was to tell me that it was essentially my fault—so my understanding that they refuse to take responsibility and have no regard for my side of the event tells me that the space was and is warranted.  I will continue working on my space and my identity and I am ok with that—always know where we stand with people.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

Sometimes the path of least resistance is a slide.  I wrote that in my last Sunday gratitude and I’ve been thinking about it non-stop.  It came to me entirely unexpectedly.  I think the announcement of the departure of a fixture in the place I’ve worked my entire adult life has shaken me up to the point where I know a different action is needed now.  I don’t think this is a bad thing because I’ve known for a long time that I needed to make a choice and walk in the direction that calls to me rather than continue to waste my time doing work that supports me but doesn’t fulfill me.  But I stuck that path because it has taken care of me for a long time, it was easy, and it was familiar.  I knew how far I could push the limit, I knew what I could get away with so to speak.  But I also hated having to ask for permission for anything.  I started working there right as I was graduating high school and going into college and I was in such a student mentality and believed that we always had to do what we were told that I’ve repeated that pattern for years.  I’ve pushed the limits of it, always—like I worked really hard for you, I expect lenience in what my day looks like and when I do the work I do.  But I’ve also asked for permission for things I needed in my day to day life, things that other people just did.  I didn’t understand that I could do that too.  I felt like I had to put my identity on hold when I was at that place and somehow fit in what I wanted to do with my life around my time there.

And that became who I was—I was quite literally living a double life. I’ve seen the changes coming for a long time because we were bought out several years ago and this is the inevitable result of giving ourselves over to someone else.  Still we continued down the path of least resistance, doing what we know every day.  All the times I lost myself, all the times I thought I was climbing again, only to realize I was sliding face first into the exact same patterns I’d repeated for decades, all of this I realized as I listened to the staple of our organization, the last executive who belonged with us tell us he was leaving us behind.  I landed, hard, and realized that the slide was no longer fun.  This path wasn’t leading me anywhere except back to the top of the slide and this was a game I no longer wanted to play.  I’d already been trying to get out of line to create something for myself and this was evidence that it’s time to exit the game, and to do that, I need a more aggressive plan.  I need to start forging a new path.  I’ve cut a circle in the dirt with all the times I’ve walked this place and now I need to step over and head in a new direction.  I take solace in knowing that if someone I’ve looked up to (because I have always liked this man) was able to make the decision to start again somewhere entirely new, to close this portion of his life, then perhaps that is the point I need to get to.

I’ve been doing a lot of letting go.  I’ve shed 38 pounds—letting go of the dependence on food.  I’ve been carefully planning the things I want to do into my life instead of talking about them and waiting for them to happen—taking responsibility for creating the life I want.  I recently let go of most of the baby clothes I had, saving only the milestone pieces–this is an admission that I will not be having anymore children, that is officially a closed chapter.  I’ve been working piecemeal on side projects for years.  I’ve been looking at other job opportunities for years.  All the while I’ve been going to the same place, driving the same path, ending up in the same town, at the same job, seeing the same people, that I have for years.  I’ve watched some of them leave and was sad.  Now I watch the last piece walk away and I know that I need to look at this differently now.  Again, when we make the choice to change it’s easier to swallow and we feel in control—at least a little bit– of what we do.  I realize that I’ve taken too long with the change and I’ve started to create a path in the land of in-between.  Thinking I’m changing but really I’m just changing enough to create a new pattern that still sustains me where I’m at.  It’s the same thing I’ve talked about with getting comfortable in the past, in the nostalgia of it.  So this letting go is different.  This time I’m not getting back in line for the slide.  It’s time to say goodbye to the childish beliefs and practices I still clung to.  It’s time to turn the page of this long run-on-sentence of a book with repeating patterns.  It’s time to begin again.