Today I am grateful for generosity.  I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be around people who are so generous.  I mean legitimately generous with their time and their attention and giving and overall kindness and understanding.  They are generous with teaching alternative ways of looking at life and having fun and not getting stuck in the mud. I’ve been fortunate enough to have experienced the entire spectrum of generosity in my life and it is a goal of mine to now remember that and work on making that a primary focus with my work and the time I spend with my friends.  I’ve said before that I 100% agree there is something absolutely liberating and energizing in giving and it shows us a new side of ourselves as well as alternate ways to connect with people.  It’s a gift to be able to give and receive.  It isn’t a selfish thing to need to receive—we are designed to receive and care for one another.  We are designed to share gifts with each other, share talents with each other, to spend time with each other.  We aren’t meant to hate.  We are meant to celebrate life and share time together.    

Today I am grateful to be with people who have a different experience and outlook on life.  Life changes depending on how you view it and it is always a choice. We don’t have to stay stuck where we are and often we find that things won’t change until we learn to change, or at least learn to change how we view them. We can look for every negative thing, every sadness, every annoyance, every slight against us.  Or we can choose to see new ways of looking at things, not taking them personally, to have fun even when it feels like we shouldn’t, to understand the game of life and to play it not for personal gain or anything like that, but for the sheer enjoyment of it.  There are different goals in life and it’s amazing what happens when we eliminate the pissing contest and simply do what we need to do, focus on what we have to, and let go.  Let go of expectation, anger, animosity, frustration.  Once those things are eliminated, an entire new world opens up, we see an entirely new way of doing things.  People with different experiences show us these new ways.

Today I am grateful for reminders to get in touch with all facets of ourselves.  A good acquaintance of mine has decided to leave where we work.  We’ve been at the same company for 11 years and have worked together on many projects directly together and it has always been a wonderful experience—she knows her stuff and she enjoys were work so it makes it very easy to get through projects with a clear goal in mind.  She sent out her notice last week and it took me by surprise because she is a valuable asset to this company and I know she loves her work—I had assumed she loved what she did and was afforded a bit more freedom within the department she was in so it was a shock to hear she was leaving.  When I reached out to her separately to talk about it, she shared that she was experiencing many of the same things we’ve all been experiencing here and she has decided that she doesn’t want to spend her time doing something she doesn’t really love anymore.  She has been afforded the opportunity and the ability to take some time away from work to focus on the things she loves doing—photography/working with animals etc.  I am so incredibly supportive of that because we never know when our time is up and we won’t have the opportunity to do what we love—take that time now.  We only have so much time afforded to us and we never know when that will run out so we need to take that opportunity, all the opportunities we are afforded now.  Make the most of it now.

Today I am grateful to get in touch with some of those facets mentioned above in new ways.  Sometimes we need to be reminded of who we are.  We are so fortunate to be given the gifts/talents and things we enjoy about life and we sometimes need to be reminded that we can do things we didn’t think we could.  Or, more specifically, that we can do the things we enjoy in different ways.  There are things that align with us in different ways at different times of our lives.  We are layered and multifaceted and we experience things in new ways.  Even if it is something we have already enjoyed or experienced, it doesn’t mean we can’t experience it in a different way.  For example, I happen to enjoy a particular type of metaphysical experience with certain stores and I found some women who like to do the same thing as well—I’ve had friends who enjoy these things before but I found a different type of way to do it.  There are so many ways to connect to what we love and sometimes we need to be reminded of those ways—not everything has to be one way and it is ok to find alternatives to enjoy similar experiences.  And sometimes those alternatives turn into new experiences. 

Today I am grateful to use these new facets and experiences and alternative ways to remember that we are meant to have fun and simply ENJOY life.  Just have fun.  Be who we are and live.  LIVE.  No one says we need to mourn our lives, and I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about the absolute worst case scenarios, feeling like shit before things even happen, before there is even a possibility of them happening.  It is amazing to be with people who literally don’t even give those things a second thought.  They simply move forward and enjoy and do the things they want to do.  It’s a nice reminder that there are so many ways to live life and we can enjoy it now—we need to enjoy it now.  We all know that our lives will end someday so why are we spending any time worrying about what we look like, what we need to appear like instead of just throwing that type of needless worry to the wind and do what we need to do? I randomly went out shopping with my girlfriends and we ended up shopping in an area we’d never been to before and went to a Gin bar-something I would NEVER have done before.  But I feel safe with these women, I feel safe with my kid being with their kids and their husbands, I feel safe in my little area and the truth is I feel safe being who I am with this group.  I enjoy finding myself here, learning to speak up, learning to allow the pieces of me out that need to be.  I love having fun, I love feeling who I am here.  I love being able to have fun without feeling bad about who I am.  I love being able to be who I am.  I consider myself fortunate that I’ve had different groups of friends do this for me and I hope I’ve done the same for them—but this is a different reminder—this is about embracing personal power. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.