“Don’t judge others.  Strict with yourself, understanding to others.  Be open to the idea that people are going to be fools or jerks or unreliable or anything else.  Let them be.  That’s their business.  That’s not inside your control.  Be disciplined with yourself, your reactions.  If someone acts ridiculous, let them.  If you’re acting ridiculous catch the problem, stop it, and work on preventing it from happening in the future.  What you do is in your control.  That is your business. Be strict about it.  Leave other people to themselves.  You have enough to worry about,” Marcus Aurelius/additional author unknown.  This is a simple lesson: let people do what they want to do, let them be who they are.  There are many annoyances in this world, I don’t pretend that they don’t exist or that I don’t wish people would behave a certain way but I know that it isn’t my choice.  I wouldn’t want someone to tell me what to do so it isn’t my place to tell people how to be either. And it isn’t my place to judge who people are or how they behave.  People will be who they want to be, all we can control is ourselves. 

The more disciplined we are with ourselves the easier things become.  As we spoke about yesterday, avoidance will do nothing except cause regret and frustration in the long run.  So will seeking the quick and easy path now.  Do the hard work now and allow for the ease of aligning run the rest of the way.  When we see we are the problem, correct ourselves.  When someone else seems to be the issue, let them and work on our response.  The truth is what we see in others a reflection of the things we need to work on in ourselves so the things that inspire anger and frustration are the things we are angry or frustrated with in ourselves.  The question becomes what can we do to correct our perspective or the actions we take?  Are we behaving how we want to behave?  Is this what we want to do with our lives?  Our words are powerful yet they mean very little in the end because we are not the ones who determine the course or quality of someone else’s life: we can only do that for our own.  Focus on what we can control and take it one step at a time.   

“Don’t avoid difficulty.  To avoid difficulty would mean complete retreat from life. It would mean hiding in ignorance.  Worse, this would make you dreadfully vulnerable to crisis if it did ever find you.  Instead, we must welcome hazard.  Rejoice in the unexpected and turn failure into strength by deciding to own it,” Marcus Aurelius.  We can’t avoid hard things.  It took me a long time to accept that.  I wasn’t looking for ease solely for myself.  I was always confused how there wasn’t a level playing field for all of us.  Like, no matter the track we are on, there needed to be an answer so why didn’t it always play out that way?  Why wasn’t there a simple answer for everything? If the entire world is a possibility and we are meant to dance in that, then why do we not have the opportunity for it to be easy?  I’m not an advocate for eliminating free will, but if there IS a right way, a way that works for all, then why don’t we eliminate all the other unnecessary crap? Why is there this hands off approach to life?  If there are no random events, then why isn’t there some kind of manual to get through?  What I’ve come to understand is that there may be a best course, but sometimes the lessons we need to learn aren’t on the best course.  Sometimes the lessons we need to learn involve humility and understanding rather than proving we are right or that we can get whatever we want.  Achieving those goals doesn’t come free—but it doesn’t have to come at a hefty price either.  We have to find the middle.

The middle sometimes looks like we are walking a fine line where we may fall to either side at any time.  That may be true.  What I’ve learned is that the middle sometimes means that the answer is something we have to work for, there are lessons we didn’t anticipate, understanding we don’t understand it all, and it means doing the work—even the work we don’t think we want to.  I have my frustrations with the difficulty we impart on our own lives, not by the work we have to do, but by the rules we create to prove our worth to some inconsequential standard that we also created.  The truth is that there is hard work to do and the path isn’t always clear.  But it is also true that we cause a great deal of our own issues with overthinking, ego, and avoidance.  Life isn’t about enduring OR avoiding—it’s about living and that includes the spectrum of experience just AS IT IS.  Not how we see it or what we think about it—but what it ACTUALLY IS.  If things don’t go how they were meant to, use it as a stone to bring us closer to how we want it to be.  Closer to what we need to learn, and then we take that experience and create an entirely new way of being aligned with who we are and what our purpose is.  We just have to be willing to embrace it. 

Life doesn’t happen to us.  It happens as we see it from the foundation of our beliefs and the lessons we’re learning to incorporate from those experiences.  How well do we pivot?  How well do we adapt?  How well do we learn to shed what doesn’t work and move forward?  How long to we hold onto what has tried to hurt us in hopes the edges will dull?  It’s all a choice and so too is deciding what is too hard and what we are willing to do—and what we aren’t.   A willingness to face what comes our way and a chance to undertake to do the work joyfully makes all the difference in the world.  What we plant we reap so if we put out seeds of anger, fear, and discord, that is what we will receive.  If we do the work with hope and intention and gratitude, we will more easily navigate through any challenge that may come our way. Life throws us curve balls for sure but the key is how we rally.  We can spend a whole lot of time finding ways to avoid what the world throws at us only to find out that it wasn’t as painful as we thought and then wishing we had done the work sooner.  We can’t avoid life otherwise it will be a life half-lived.  It’s better to learn to face the task head on rather than in hind site.  Be open and willing to trust that we are more than capable to handle whatever comes our way—it’s our journey, every part of it, good bad or otherwise.

Today I am grateful for making dreams come true.  Every since my kid was born, I had envisioned being a part of his life in so many ways.  Attending school functions, being the room mom, being able to drop him off and pick him up from school.  This past Friday I was able to make that a reality and be part of his Halloween party.  In the years up to now, I’d been able to at least leave work early to see him during his parade which was always fun and we were always thrilled to see each other, but all the special events during the day I would miss.  So being able to take part of his party, to share my energy toward something he loved, to ensure these kids had a great time felt amazing. It was all I wanted.  I am so grateful to be able to do that and more.  I have the opportunity with my new role to be able to do this again for other events and I am so excited to do it. It was worth it, and while I wish I could have done it sooner, I am so happy to have been able to do this for him now and to do it again in the future.

Today I am grateful for new connections.  Relationships change, sometimes when we least expect it.  In those moments we have a choice to lament, fight for it, or change it.  We can always mourn what was (or what we thought it was), that’s a necessary part of that dynamic.  But when a relationship is stagnant and changes/ends, it opens opportunities to learn new parts of ourselves and to find other relationships that we didn’t know we needed.  I met some amazing, strong women this past weekend and I see the value of strength in numbers with focused action rather than emotional draws.  A focused target and goal makes all the difference.  There are a lot of people in this world and we are not all each other’s cup of tea so it can be bitter to realize that we simply don’t mesh with people we thought we did.  It can be distasteful to find that someone isn’t the person you thought they were.  But it is a relief to know that there are those who DO understand us, who reciprocate, who work toward the same goal, who aren’t there to undermine you.  There’s a whole new world waiting in those scenarios and they exist.  The world and our experience of it can be whatever we want it to be.  We just have to make the choice.  Who we connect with and surround ourselves with is well within our control.  I’ve learned to choose wisely.

Today I am grateful for being a bigger person.  We had an unfortunate incident this weekend where one of the kids who was out with the group was lost for a brief period of time.  He’s young, got confused, and walked off with another group of kids.  The short version is that this is a happy ending and we found him.  The long version is that this was the child of a woman who has been a source of pain, anger, and frustration over the last few months.  When we realized the child was missing, there were no questions asked—every single one of us dropped what we were doing and we put our energy toward finding this child.  None of the bullshit mattered and every single one of us saw that and joined in to find this child.  We even managed to end the event with a hug.  The discussion on the status of our relationship will happen another day, but in that moment we rose above and did what we had to do. 

Today I am grateful for honesty.  It’s not that I’m not an honest person, but I will admit that there are times I try to stick keenly to the middle.  It isn’t a matter of me trying to make people happy, it’s a matter of trying to keep the peace and make sure that I do understand all sides of the situation.  Given the scenario of what has happened over the last few months, I could no longer do that.  At the same get-together mentioned above, I had the chance to confront the people who’d been responsible for a lot of the issues we had this summer.  I explained my side and what happened even though I was told, “I don’t need to see receipts.”  I could have acquiesced and tried to choke down ownership for the entire thing.  Instead, I said, “Clearly you do because this isn’t what happened.  I tried to contact each person 3 times—that’s 9 points of outreach and no one responded to me so I don’t want to hear that I didn’t contact people.”  And I showed the proof of it on the phone.  Proof that it wasn’t me who ignored the request to talk.  I also firmly said that there were wrongs on all sides of this and that I will not take responsibility for the entire thing when I’ve put in this kind of effort to explain, make amends, was ignored, and the behavior continued.  It was clear that with this group, the view is that we are the enemy so to speak (or at least the problem) but clearing the air with a few people has changed where I’m at–It’s taken months but I finally got it all out.  And it felt good.

Today I am grateful for truly learning to flex.  Flex my time, flex my ability flex my understanding.  We have 24 hours in a day and I am a control freak about sticking with a routine and doing things at the time they’re meant to be completed.  I wanted to break that habit and it’s been a pattern I too often fall back into.  But I’ve realized that live doesn’t always go how we want it to and sometimes we have to give up our idea of how it is to see how it is.  Nothing is perfect.  It doesn’t have to be—yet, somehow, it is perfect as it is.  How it happens is fine—it turns out fine.  That is the reestablishment of trust in my life—that’s an entirely additional battle so to speak, but it’s a gift.  So when it comes to flex, I realized that being in the moment is where we need to be.  I wasn’t feeling well at all yesterday and spent most of the day down and out physically.  I still had work to do so I managed to get done what I needed to and then relaxed.  I didn’t rush, I didn’t panic, I didn’t stress.  I just did what I could and then listened to my body.  And here I am, on Sunday, still working, looking at the gaps in my schedule for next week knowing that I have all the time in the world to do what I need to do. It’s my choice.  Time moves no matter what we do—it’s up to us what we do with it.  Use it well.    

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

Like we spoke about yesterday, we seek validation for so many reasons.  Human nature related to the desire to belong or the desire to be heard, the desire to be right.  We want to know our existence matters and there are times we feel we’d do anything to KNOW we matter.  While I was working my 9-5 the other day, listening to music, I was brought into the moment with a line from a song by SpillTab-Velcro.  I’ve heard it a million times and I’ve always loved it but something in that moment caught me and I realized how important and significant it really is.  The line says, “Every other chance I get to go without you, I go out to see if I’ve lost my stride or if I still run; Betting on a plan with no variables I’m easily thrown by every little influence under the sun.”   It speaks to needing to know who we are, to not get so wrapped up in other people, overly attached to what they do, their thoughts and opinions.  We need our own identity no matter what.  We are ourselves first and always will be regardless of who comes into our lives. 

We bring our whole selves to our work and relationships and we create something new—we don’t immerse ourselves so deeply in something that we BECOME that thing or that we lose who we are to that effort.  We express who we are through these pursuits rather than use a pursuit to give us meaning.  It’s because we are connected with our work that we find purpose.  We guide ourselves and we keep our awareness of our direction, mission, vision, goals outside of what we do with other people.  We need to believe in our own strength and identity because at the end of the day, we stand with ourselves and we have to look at our actions and determine if they were right—we only know that if we know our own values.  If we are influenced by everyone else, then our best laid plans will never pan out.  We can have a goal, a singular focus, but if we take other’s input to heart too often, then we will never cross the finish line of our own goals because we will spend more time trying to incorporate and bend to what other people think is right than doing what we KNOW is right for ourselves.

We’ve previously spoken at length about what it means to seek validation outside of ourselves In terms of relationships and work and anything we do hoping to get some sort of approval from others.  We tie our worth to what we receive from the outside, what people think of us, and soon we become the chameleon, adapting and shifting and changing with each situation.  That’s the fastest way to lose ground on our personal identity.  Every now and then, even in the HEALTHIEST of situations, we need to take time to recenter and make sure our actions are aligned with our values and beliefs and that we aren’t doing something simply for the sake of getting a specific reaction out of people.  We always need to remain separate because the truth is we are not halves made whole by any other person—we are whole beings on our own with specific talents that require our mastery and knowledge so we can bring those skills to use in whatever we create.  No one will fill the gaps we may feel related to finding purpose—we must recognize those gaps and create the means to fully express what is needed.  No one can do that for us.  So go out and remember how to run to our own rhythm and don’t allow the outside to throw us off. 

“Don’t seek validation. Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.  Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.  Real success, real mastery, real sanity that comes only by tying it to your own actions,” Marcus Aurelius.  The real measure of success is knowing that we are doing better than we did yesterday.  As we’ve been talking about, competition and comparison serve no real purpose beyond creating an imagined hierarchy.  Let’s be clear: at the end of our lives, we all end up in the same position—a body that will decay and fade away.  No matter what we have done in life, we all turn to dust and that is the great equalizer of this Earth.  Logically, that means there is no truth to the separation we create between us, there is no better or worse, there is no real power play.  We all need guidance from each other every now and then but that doesn’t make anyone different than us—we are all human and we all have something to bring to the table.  When we need someone to affirm our worth, we’ve lost sight of our role.  I think it’s fine to be ambitious and it’s fine to know our contribution to this world but playing the game of finding worth from outside sources and showing the world is a slippery slope to losing sight of our purpose.

Life is meaningful on its own.  We are here through an alchemical mixture of timing, genetics, creativity, destruction, hope, emptiness, wholeness, purpose, and endless potential.  There is pure magic in that and the fact that we are here is indication that we don’t need to achieve some arbitrary mark to prove our worth.  We don’t need to acquire a certain amount of things to show our value.  Expressing and contributing our gifts IS our value and we find worth in ourselves through learning to master those skills well.  Our safety and well-being can never be granted from someone else because we tie ourselves to their values and ideas rather than our own and our path becomes determined by someone else.  Do what feels right and learn to navigate the world through that feeling, an ever present connectedness that guides us to the next step. 

“Don’t be overheard complaining.  Not even to yourself.  Look inward, not outward.  Don’t complain.  Don’t meddle in the affairs of others.  When you see someone acting objectionably, remember when you have acted that way,” Marcus Aurelius.  The theme of looking inward and taking responsibility for ourselves continues.  I don’t deny that sometimes the world delivers what feels like unfair blows, bestows gifts to those we don’t necessarily feel deserve it (or we have an opinion on it—we’re human, we have ideas of who deserves what 😊).  But when we complain, we are stuck in a state of comparison, essentially saying that what we have isn’t right, it isn’t good enough, it isn’t worthy or something similar.  We’re essentially saying that we don’t belong where we are or the circumstances we are in aren’t correct.  The truth is we will never know that.  All we know for sure is that we only have control over our actions in the moment.  We don’t have foresight to how every circumstance will turn out—we aren’t meant to know every answer to everything.  That’s a lot of weight to carry.  All we can do and all we are responsible for is walking our path—and every step along the way is part of that path, the good and the bad.  We are human, we all make mistakes, we all have faults and flaws—and that is by design.  So why would we complain about things we can’t change? 

Another theme from this week is the concept of time.  Our time here is so incredibly brief, why would we waste any of it being upset about what we can’t change?  Why would we focus on what went wrong versus what we can make right?  Sure, we need to understand what went wrong to avoid similar mistakes again, but if we stay stuck in the wrong, we will never move on to what’s right.  We only have control over our reactions and our decisions and we never know the full story of what someone is experiencing.  Sure, it may look like the grass is greener elsewhere but we don’t know what that person endured to get there.  We don’t always consider that just because certain facets of other people’s lives look good that there are other areas where they struggle.  Often those with impressive gain have equally impressive losses either through taking chances or through some sort of lesson of fate that taught them to move forward.  It isn’t up to us to judge that person.  We never know where they are on their journey.  So yet again, the question remains, why would we waste time complaining about that which we have no control over nor do we fully understand?  We aren’t meant to understand it.

Our time is much better spent on activities that produce the results we ARE looking for.  We may not hit a home run our first time at bat, but the more we swing, we get closer and closer to it until we get our timing and power right to knock it out of the park.  We develop skills and resilience and strength and we learn to appreciate that other people have skills and resilience and strengths in different arenas than ours.  They aren’t competition.  There really is no competition in this world.  Man created it as a means to create a hierarchy and separation over people in an effort to control them.  We need to look at what we have in a different context.  What we have are the tools we’ve been given in our lives.  We’ve spent a lifetime building a kit to help us walk our paths and there will be a time our paths intersect with someone else, perhaps learning the same lesson, perhaps using our lessons as a stepping stone, and we will use those skills to learn something else.  So don’t worry about where we are on the journey—understand that we are on OUR journey and that looks different than everyone else’s.  There is no comparison for that, there is no one who has lived our journey before.  So keep going.      

“Don’t blame a clown for acting like a clown.  Ask yourself why you keep going to the circus,” Daniel Chidiac.  If we have no control over other people’s actions, then why do we continue to show up and interact with them expecting them to change? When we’re younger, going to the circus seems like a fun thing, but as an adult, we tire of the façade, the sleight of hand, and he needless filler that wastes our time. If we take the time to express concerns about our relationship to the other party and they continue to engage in the specific behavior that caused the issue in the first place, that has become a choice.  That is crossing a boundary and outright disrespect.  Sure we can continue to bring up the issue to the person but if they aren’t going to take the time or put in the effort to change a behavior that causes distress, then that is a relationship that needs to be put to rest.  Why do we keep coming back?  We’ve been open and honest and they aren’t reciprocating and they certainly aren’t showing respect or regard for our feelings.  Expecting someone like that to change is futile.  So why do we engage?

I believe in giving people chances and I have probably given more than was reasonable in some situations.  I should have gotten the hint way sooner than I did and walked away from the scenario because it was clear where I stood with the person.  They say when someone shows you who they are, believe them—and there were people who clearly showed me who they were and I continually hoped they would treat me right or realize what they did and we could make amends and move on.  Some of those people did and some didn’t.  I equated my value to the ones who didn’t seem to want to treat me how any decent person should have been treated and I allowed my boundaries to be crossed repeatedly no matter how vehemently I said I would stick with them.  I needed the validation and I often never got it even after making allowances and going against my values.  That was one reason for going back to the circus.

The other reason comes down to self-esteem.  If we feel we can only have or are worth a certain type of relationship then we continually lower the bar until we can are stepped on.  If we have a healthy sense of self-worth and a firm sense of who we are, boundaries and values, we don’t tolerate the clowns in our lives and we certainly don’t keep buying tickets to go to the same show over and over again.  We know how it ends every time and we find better ways to use our time.  We find better people to direct our energy towards.  We find the worth within.  Some people simply won’t help who they are—I refuse to say can’t because anyone can change their behavior.  They feel they are who they are and that they can treat people like crap.  They can be disrespectful to others and themselves and not think twice about it and just because certain people may allow it, we don’t have to.  Who we surround ourselves with is a conscious choice and we all deserve respect and appreciation.  Anyone who isn’t holding up their end of the deal needs to go.  Stop entertaining them.  Life gets a whole lot better, more clear, more manageable when we get rid of the people running a riot act on our lives.  Eliminate the chaos and watch what happens. 

“Do not get upset with people or situations.  Both are powerless without your reaction,” Daniel Chidiac.  I unfortunately was one of those people who took everything personally and felt like there was a “right” way to do things and to behave in all situations.  Even if I hadn’t experienced them myself, I thought I knew what had to be done and I held people to it.  I put my nose in situations I had no business in, things that had no impact on me whatsoever, and when I wasn’t asked.  I liked control and I liked to show people how right I was all the time.  Not an attractive trait by any means, I know and I’ve long since reconciled the need. Regardless, I realize this is another waste of time.  We simply have no control over people and there are those who will fall in line and play exactly by the rules and there are those who will write their own rules and there are those who will go contrary to the rules simply because they can and there are people who just want to see what they can get us to do—they like to see how they affect people. My habit of reacting and correcting people had total power over me—instead of learning to control myself.  The entirety of the world had control over me—I ran around the mountain.

I want to be clear that there is a time and place to voice our opinions and concerns and there is a time to evaluate the people in our lives.  Sometimes we have to make tough decisions and cut those people out of our lives rather than try to control their decisions and reactions.  Sometimes we have to realize when we are the issue and our commentary isn’t needed.  People have the right to live their lives as they see fit whether we agree with it or not. We don’t all fit in the same box and we aren’t meant to.  Time moves too quickly for us to worry about what others do when it comes to things that have no impact on our lives.  Life is about freedom and we can’t truly be free if we run around the mountain telling people what they need to do when we’re heading to the same place—it doesn’t matter how we get there.  Sometimes those contrary people exist to show us another way.  It isn’t worth allowing a temporary situation to dictate how we feel and what we do.  I know I’ve made a fool of myself acting like I knew what path they were on when I didn’t even see my own. 

At the end of the day the only path we have control over is our own.  Reacting to everything only takes away from our own focus and takes away from our own power. Don’t give away power voluntarily toward pursuits that have no bearing on our course.  Keep calm, centered, and focused, and let people run their own race.  Stay in our respective lanes and deal with the course in front of us.  The amount of control we have over our lives is astonishing and the amount of progress we can make, the amount of life we can live, and the lessons we can learn on our own course is astonishing.  That’s the only course we need to know and the truth is, simply living our lives will create ripple effects throughout the world that we can’t begin to imagine.  Just because our footprints fade away doesn’t mean our echoes can’t be heard in the work other people do.  It’s a fine line between the things that matter and the things that don’t—and in terms of legacy, we won’t be here and we certainly won’t have a say in the stories people tell anyway.  So let people live and live our own lives, exactly as we are meant to.   

“Don’t suffer imagined troubles.  We spend so much time worried about how bad things are going to be, that we actually torture ourselves more than the thing we’re worried about every could.  We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” Seneca.  This follows nicely after our piece Saturday about using our energy to worry.  Why would we spend our time creating destructive scenarios in our mind?  Most of us would agree that is what we seek to avoid and we’d all say we want the best outcome yet our brains tend to anticipate what’s wrong with a scenario over what’s right.  As we spoke about Saturday, that is the amygdala’s function—prepare for what’s wrong so we are kept safe.  I spent a majority of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop no matter what I was doing.  I approached every day ready to fight, searching for the next thing to tackle in an endless circle of useless vigilance.  I’m not saying there weren’t times it paid off—I pride myself on my ability to handle a real crisis.  I mean, I should be able to handle anything considering how often I’ve already played that scenario in my head.  But was it truly worth my time?  All the time spent worrying over what might happen rather than simply enjoying the moment.  All that time trying to be someone else or to appear a certain instead of allowing the real me to shine. 

When we use our energy to worry or to create things to be troubled over, we live in a troubled state.  We’re in our heads far more than anywhere and negative thoughts make our minds a veritable prison.  We are aware of this and we all acknowledge that we know we need to manage our thoughts yet it still proves to be one of the hardest things to do.  Those neural pathways are engrained deeply into the core of who we are and changing that routing takes a ton of effort, focus, and repeated trials.  It’s a real challenge to focus on what’s right after ages of finding what’s wrong.  It’s a trauma response.  If we live our lives in an ever vigilant state, it’s because we never felt safe.  Maybe we moved around a lot as a kid, maybe there was addiction in the family, maybe we had to take responsibility before we were ready, or maybe we were just witness to things we shouldn’t have been.  Regardless of the reason, we never learned to settle in our own skin and trust that no matter what happened we would be fine.  We thought we had to control the uncontrollable and we thought it all fell to us.  That’s a painful existence and it’s exhausting.  That translates to bigger and bigger things as we get older, creating more things we have to take control over.

The world will keep going regardless of what we do.  Whether we think we win or lose, there is always another day and there always will be.  There will come a day when the sun sets on our days and eventually that memory will fade into nothingness.  So with such precious little time here, we need to truly consider from the depths of our souls why we are so keyed up on being perfect, on worrying over things that will have little impact in the end.  That is to discourage people from trying to have an impact, rather, it’s to remind people that the only way we can have an influence is to act on something, to DO something and, no matter what we do, it will eventually be interpreted differently than we intended or it will be left with the wind.  Live life and live it well.  We were given the opportunity to experience all this world has to offer and we should jump in whole heartedly because we will never get another opportunity.  Don’t waste time pretending the world is on fire because we see the sun.  Face the light and take the leap.  No matter what we will land and we will learn.  We can’t live our lives in a bubble—we will not arrive at the finish line unscathed so we may as well take the time to dance in the light.    

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.