It had been a tough morning and the day never improved. Jenny had arrived late to work having spent too much time trying to get her hair just right.

“Damn it” she yelled as she slammed the hairdryer onto the vanity.

“Why do I have to deal with this every single day? Why can’t I have hair that just does what I tell it?”

Even before she had opened her eyes, the day went downhill. Jenny started thinking about her weight.

What was the scale going to say this morning?

Most of Jenny’s mornings started out this way. The worry over the scale, the hair that wouldn’t cooperate, the decision about what she could wear that would cover up her bulging tummy and thighs.

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.

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?

The other day, after watching A Man Called Otto, my sister and I were talking about Tom Hanks and some of the films he’s been in. We both thought Apollo 13 was a good movie. My sister commented that she was sad for that one astronaut in the movie who got sick because he held his pee. Me, not remembering that part, asked why he had to hold his pee and she couldn’t remember. So I googled it and it turns out that Houston had told the astronauts they couldn’t dump their pee because they were concerned it could move the craft onto a different trajectory.

Can you imagine, a small condom filled with pee tossed into space shifting the trajectory of a spacecraft?

If that’s true, then think how small things, and I suppose a condom is one example, can change the trajectory of a life?

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.

I used to worry what other people thought of me. Well, in all honesty, I still do, but not as much as a few years ago. It’s a process.

Spending time wondering what other people think can use up a lot of energy and precious time. And in the end, can we even really know what someone else is thinking?

Have you ever heard the saying “It’s none of your business what other people think of you”? It sounds a bit harsh, but think about it for a minute and you’ll see that it makes perfect sense.

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.

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.