This being human is amazing even if it is a full-time job. And it’s not like it’s even a forty hour a week job. It’s all day, every day, for decades - possibly for over a century.

It probably starts the same way every morning. If you’re lucky, you get to wake up when you feel like it, but mostly we wake up to an alarm – either digital or four-legged. We hop, drag or get ourselves pushed out of bed and begin our day.

How do you accept the challenge of a new day? Is it something you look forward to or do you tend to dread it.

Each day is a new beginning, so even if you dreaded yesterday, today you have a new opportunity.

I love that. I love knowing that I always have the opportunity to try a new way.
Being human is a gift we have given ourselves. Do you believe that? Can you see how your life, no matter how challenging, is a gift?

“Well,” you might say, “if it’s such a gift, why does it feel so hard sometimes?”
If your life feels hard, think about this:

Who do you know who has had the exact same life as you? The same experiences? The same joys? The same hardships?

No one.

Your life is unique and that’s because you have something to offer the world that no one else has. Every aspect of your life has made you who you are.

As humans, we struggle.

Doesn’t it seem odd to you that struggle is something we all have in common?

I guess the question I have is: Is struggle our true nature?

I don’t think it is.

Love and being in joy are our true divine natures and we are first and foremost divine beings. In a human body, we experience life on earth to grow and evolve our souls. I believe we give ourselves experiences so we can so we can make choices of how we choose to be in any given moment.

I love looking through old pictures. Those times when my family appeared happy with toothy smiles. Well, except for the one when my sister was minus her two front teeth.

There’s a snapshot of her in that stack of pictures from the 60’s when we were on our annual two-week camping vacation on Cape Cod. She was around six years old and wearing her dark red and navy-blue plaid seersucker bathing suit. It was a one piece with white piping on the pockets and yoke. I had one just like it. We would sit at the edge of the shore line at Nauset Beach waiting for waves to come up onto us and deposit sand in our pockets. We would laugh so hard. In the picture of us at the campground, my sister’s wearing her bathing suit with her beloved cowboy boots.

Humans need connection. We’d all like the people in our lives to be like-minded or at least supportive, but sometimes they’re just not. Which can make connecting with others feel scary or like too much work. Perhaps you're someone who would love to just be by yourself for rest of your life. That can sound good, but…

The desire to connect is a human attribute that we need to intentionally bring back into vogue. Why? Because that’s how we grow.

When I think of connection, the image that forms in my mind is of a grid, a network, with a light at the intersection where two lines meet. The lines represent the energetic flow of myself and those people who are, or who will be, in my life. Life lines perhaps.

“Thanks for taking these library books back for me.” I said to my friend.
“You’re welcome, I’ll try to take care of that for you.”
“Try?” I asked myself. Try?
“Do you think you won’t be able to?” I asked her.
“Oh, no, I’ll stop over this afternoon and drop them off.” She replied.
“Okay, thanks so much.”
 
There’s a big difference between try and will. When my friend said she’d try, she didn’t sound committed to making sure the books would be returned. If at first she’d said, “Yes, I will take them over this afternoon” there would have been no question. It’s a firm commitment of intention.

“I really want to lose some weight” a client said to me.
“How much would you like to lose?”
“Probably 35 pounds, I’d like to weigh 125.”
“When was the last time you weighed 125?” I queried.
“When I was in college.”
“And how old are you now?”
“Fifty-five.”

Does this conversation resonate with you? You’ve put on some weight and you’d love more than anything to lose it and have the body you once had.

May I ever so gently remind you that you'll never be twenty again?

I don’t mean to sound defeatist. Not at all. I’m a realist and by that I mean, I accept the present moment with compassion. I allow that who and what I am in this moment is exactly the way I’m intended to be – a little rounder in the middle, gray hair, sagging breasts.

Sure, I’d like some things to be different. I too wouldn’t mind wearing some of the cute little outfits of my youth, but then again…

What’s your definition of abundance? Do you see yourself living in abundance now and in the future? If not, why not?

This was a question I posed in an earlier post. If you didn’t have a chance to read it, you can find it here.

Many of us initially think of abundance as an overflowing of something, such as the abundance of rain we’ve had in the northeast or having so much money we could swim in it. But if we allow our perspective to shift a bit, we can see that having abundance means having what you need when you need it.

I have an upcoming trip to California for my niece’s wedding and that has been taking up a lot of my mental and emotional energy. Not that I've been thinking about the warm weather or walks on the beautiful Santa Barbara beaches. No. I've been focusing on the outfit I needed to put together for the wedding. For months.

I went shopping for an outfit and didn’t find one thing that I would consider wearing. My only option was to take the tea-length dress I bought for another niece’s wedding, that I didn’t end up wearing because it made me look like a moose, and use the fabric to make a skirt.

My vision for humanity is global peace, where humans live in love and compassion for self and each other. There are a number of components to global peace and they all work together to create a world where everyone is respected for their uniqueness – for showing up.