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.
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I’ve been thinking about being stuck. Stuck as it applies to not wanting to change. Sometimes, even when we don’t like what we’re doing or how we’re behaving, thinking about stepping into a new way of being can be unsettling because we can feel like we’re stepping into the unknown.
Patterns of behavior are established for a reason, but what if the reason no longer exists? What if the pattern has become toxic in its old age? What I find interesting is how we can learn about ourselves and the patterns we’re holding onto through our relationships. We learn about our triggers, we learn what we like, what we don’t like, what our needs are. Relationships help us grow. But what happens if we don’t allow them to? For instance, what if you’re in a relationship that leaves you talking over and over to yourself or someone else about how much that person annoys you, how they don’t get you, or how they seem to hold a superior attitude? 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. There’s a story of a woman who always cuts off the ends of her roast beef before roasting it. One day someone asked her why she removed the ends and she replied that her mother had always done it that way, it was how to cook a roast. Curious, when the woman asked her mother why she cut off the ends of the roast, the mother replied that it was the only way it would fit in her pan.
Do you cut the ends off your roast? Most of us do. We learn things at an early age by observing our parents or caregivers. We also learn from social media, advertising, or from observing our peers. Those observations go into our subconscious and drive our thoughts and beliefs until we question them. So often though, we don’t question them because why would we? Only until they seem to be causing a problem, we are questioned by another or they present themselves as some sort of a discrepancy to something else we’ve learned more recently, do they ever rise to the level of being examined. Can you catch yourself?
Does that phrase bring up images of you chasing yourself around in circles? For many of us, it does. You try to get one thing accomplished and something else pops up that takes your attention. On and on it goes until you find the only thing you’ve managed to do is spin your wheels and end up completely exhausted. The same can be true with your thoughts. “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. There are many ways we can move our bodies, but for me, I like walking. Inhaling fresh air, especially on a crisp fall day, is heaven on earth.
In the summer when it’s hot, I like to get up before the sunrise to walk. More than the heat though, the road I walk on is due east/west so the sun rises behind me and I’m not visible to oncoming traffic. The road is a very narrow country road, so there’s a survival component to my getting up early. As I walk, I greet the maple trees in my front yard and the neighborhood Golden Retriever Ginger who sits outside waiting for a passerby to play ball with her. One morning, she sat with a plastic bat in her mouth – the image of it still cracks me up. When I try to force an idea into being, and inevitably get stuck, my ego starts spurting out thoughts of not being good enough or of how lame I am.
An interesting thing about the mind is how it’s not creative. But then again, that’s not really the mind’s role, is it. The mind can only use information it’s attained externally – it’s not creative, it doesn’t imagine, but it is a whiz at processing. Trying to force the mind into bringing forth a fresh idea only creates fodder for the ego. So where do those imaginative ideas come from? Are you feeling nourished? For so many of us, the answer might be, “Are you crazy? I don’t have time for that.” We get busy taking care of those around us, at home or at work, forgetting to fill ourselves up.
But honestly, how many times have we been told we have to put our own oxygen mask on first, then tend to those around us? We can’t give what we don’t have. Whether it’s our attention, love, care, whatever. We need to be closer to full on the nourished needle than to empty. Self-care is nourishment. Remembering, and accepting, that you’re as important, if not more so, than anyone around you can be a challenge. We tend to think we need to go all out and be everything to everybody. But it’s not possible and especially not when you’re running on fumes. |
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