Today I am grateful for impulse.  I don’t always advocate for quick decisions based on how we are feeling in the moment but I’d be remiss in saying there aren’t times it’s warranted.  We decided to take a last minute trip to visit a friend a few hours away just for the hell of it.  I hadn’t seen her since July and we’ve been making a diligent and focused effort to reconnect with each other.  This has been my best friend for over 30 years so taking a few hours out of my day to drive over and see her isn’t a huge ask.  I mean, I know I couldn’t do it every day, but there is no reason why I can’t do this every few months, it’s not like she’s overseas.  She’s just a bit further over.  So making a last minute decision to go and visit and strengthen our bonds more is well worth it.  It’s nice to show appreciation in gestures like that and there was a time I may have decided that I couldn’t afford to do it or that I was too busy to go, but there are ALWAYS ways to get done what we need to. Sometimes we just have to get our of our heads and follow our instincts.  Believe me, it’s always worth it in the end.

Today I am grateful for getting back to the basics.  I’m starting a new series of pieces from the stoics this week. I’ve done a series like that before, but I feel it’s time for all of us to de-escalate a bit.  We need reminders to not get so heavily emotionally invested in what’s happening around us.  We are born with strength and opinions and ideas and a firm sense of right and wrong as well as a determined sense of purpose.  We don’t need to get lost in what other people are feeling nor do we need to do their feeling work for them or clean up after the messes created in emotional outbursts.  We need to learn to temper those emotions, to handle our thoughts, to regulate our responses, and to react with intention.  We are human and I don’t pretend that we are free of emotional reactions.  I’m saying we’ve allowed emotion to run things for too long and we’ve gotten ourselves into some pretty sticky situations lately whether socially, economically, politically, or from any other social construct that we need to shift our focus.  Our feelings are transient and will change—we need to stop making rapid fire decisions based on how we feel in the moment.  This differs from what I was talking about with impulse above—the impulse to connect is vastly different than the impulse to create strife between people because we feel our opinions weren’t heard.  So we need to recenter and refocus and put our efforts toward creating peace and hope and a place for use to express our given talents.  We need to learn to come together again and express opinions and not take them personally—we need to argue the idea NOT the person.  So we need to take a breath and remember WE run the show-not our opinion or feeling in the moment.

Today I am grateful for reminders that I can help.  In some cases all it takes is listening.  Change is challenging and when we witness the people we care about going through a change that they can do nothing about, when we see those we love feel helpless and trapped by something, it can be just as daunting for us as well.  I used to hide from the hard stuff like death, disease, the loss of the ability to communicate and flow.  I feared all those things and honestly they still scare me.  I still feel angry and helpless at the fact that we all deteriorate.  Sure, I logically know that there is a season for everything, we all have our time.  That doesn’t mean I have to like it.  And the fact that I don’t like it doesn’t mean that I can do anything to stop it.  So seeing the ones I love and looked up to start to get to a point where they need care and they are afraid and unsure of what to do next, it made me feel good to face those fears and stand with them.  I listened, I held space.  This isn’t said with selfish intent but the truth is their change is a change for me as well.  It’s the loss of the roles we played and what we knew for nearly our entire lives.  My heart mourns the close of a chapter of life that held so much meaning to me.  Sure there was conflict and not every day was perfect, but it was ours.  Ther comes a time we have to move forward without those we love and there will be the before and after, when they were here and when they aren’t.  And all we can do is be present for each other.  Nothing will stop the passage of time or the effects it has on all of us.  We just need to be there for each other.   

Today I am grateful for understanding.  Sometimes it takes longer than expected to get to a place of understanding because we’re dealing with a version of reality we expected to be a certain way.  The brain can’t reconcile what it thought against what is actually happening.  I’ve stuck with a vision in my mind of how I thought life should be and I haven’t been able to get there—I became stuck trying to backtrack and recreate the path, recreate the way I thought things should happen.  I had to accept that THIS is where we are.  My reality wasn’t the same as the reality in my head.  I lived on potential and dreams and drive, some days just pushing through on pure grit.  It would have been far easier had I taken in the reality around me and believed what I knew was the truth but didn’t want to accept.  I understand why I did that.  We all face varying degrees of trauma and my trauma led me to hyper fixate and control.  I felt safe thinking I knew the outcome.  I’d prepare for every scenario.  That’s a lot of pressure for one person to handle.  But I understand now that this is where w are.  We have to ask the question what we are holding onto and why and then we have to let it go.  That’s the scariest thing in the world.  The moment we let go of what we knew, the moment we accept the reality of what is and let go of what could be.  We have to let it go.

Today I am grateful for expanding outside of myself.  I built my little world around what I knew and what made me feel safe and what I hoped or thought I could control.  I fell behind the time.  As I said earlier I got stuck because I thought things had to go a certain way.  I’ve learned that life doesn’t play fair—and the first time I learned that lesson I couldn’t handle it.  I froze where I was, trying to figure it out, thinking I could start again.  We can’t live frozen in time, some new age-ish version of Miss Havisham.  The world moves on.  Time moves on and we can either prepare and be ready to move forward or we can fight it.  The fight we will lose.  So we have to look outside of ourselves and seek a way to do more for others because the only thing we can control is what we do. The answers we seek are so often within and they lead us to what to do.  This is slightly tangential but it tracks with the healing process. We can’t do anything if we don’t accept what is.    

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.