February 2022 - Page 2 of 3 - Adulting: Second- Half

Clip-On Friday

21,555 Friday Happy Stock Photos, Pictures & Royalty-Free Images - iStock

I’m a big believer in trying to make every day a good day, but come on, on Fridays, “the good part” just doesn’t take much effort, does it? Friday is my favorite day of the week, mostly because I love the feelings of freedom and anticipation. On Fridays, here at the blog, I list my favorites. Typically, I try to list around three favorite products, or books, or TV shows, or whatevers that have helped to make my life interesting and enjoyable. Please share some of your favorites in my Comments section. It’s always fun to discover new favorites.

My favorite reading this morning:

“We cannot wake up and know who we are, as we are always building it. Much remains unreconciled, an indication of being alive.” – Holiday Mathis

Friends, we are all works in progress. That’s the joy and the process of living. Cut yourself a break this weekend and just experience the experience without judgment. Please, don’t take yourself so seriously. Be grateful that you have all of the ingredients: mind, body, and spirit, in order to fully experience the awesomeness of living a life on Earth. That’s honestly all there is to it.

My favorite story of the week:

My friend asked her mother-in-law if she believed in “love at first sight.” “Absolutely!” her mother-in-law replied. “It’s happened to me 14 times!” I imagine that there was a pregnant pause at this moment. I know that my eyebrows were raised listening to my friend tell her story. I thought to myself, “Wow, now that’s what I call a romantic!”

My friend’s mother-in-law continued, “The first time that I laid eyes on my three sons, and my eleven grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I completely experienced love at first sight. No doubts about it.”

Some people are just so awesome to their very cores, aren’t they???

My second favorite story of the week: (This time I was eavesdropping at my physical therapy session. My regular readers know that I do this. Tsk. Tsk. It’s a bad habit of mine, but you must know, we writers tend to eavesdrop. Facts.)

The young male physical therapist was lamenting to his older female patient about how much his young sons fight and argue. The woman mentioned that her own sons are now in their forties, but when they were young and they were fighting and fussing, she would take two chairs, sit them down and make the boys face each other. She would then say, “Compliment each other, until I say stop!”

Now, the woman admitted that this activity never went the way that she had planned. One boy would start with, “I really like how ugly your hair looks today.” And then the other brother would try to creatively top his brother’s “compliment” with something even better, like, “I really like how you keep proving to me that you are even stupider than I thought you were . . . ” The woman told her PT that the boys got a big hoot and holler out of this activity and they would end up in fits of laughter, and they would be buddies all over again in a matter of minutes. The brothers would bond over clever and witty insults disguised as compliments. (As a mother of three sons, I know that this has to be a true story. Boys get a charge out of insulting each other. I’ve never quite understood it, but it does create a bro-bond like nothing else does.)

When I hear stories like these, I always think to myself, “Why didn’t I think of that???” It almost makes me want to go back to mothering young children. (“Almost” being the key word here.)

My favorite product of the week:

My husband and I went to the grocery store together to pick out a pile of junk food to enjoy while watching the Super Bowl last Sunday. Russell Stover chocolates were “buy one/ get one” at our local Publix. How perfect, his and her boxes of chocolate, even before Valentine’s Day!!! After devouring two boxes of Russell Stover Assorted Milk Chocolate Covered Nuts this week, my husband and I both agreed that we have been way too snobby about Russell Stover candy. I wish that I didn’t love this candy as much as I do. I wish that I was still a chocolate snob who hadn’t eaten 26 pieces of Russell Stover chocolate this week. My husband even noted that the candy was not perfectly molded to the point that it almost looked like it was homemade. Go get you some Russell Stover chocolates today, if there is any left. It is sure to be on sale after Valentines Day.

That’s all from me for today. Remember that favorites come in all different packages and many favorites are absolutely free. List your favorites today. This activity will bring a smile to your face. I promise you. This activity is one of my favorite things to do because it brings the joy of my favorites bubbling up to the surface, all over again.

See you tomorrow! Have a great weekend!!!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Changing It Up

Last night, my husband and I watched the latest episode of “1883”. There was a poignant scene (spoiler alert) in which Elsa tells her mother that the pioneers (many of these pioneers were immigrants from other countries) who are bringing all of their old customs, and the ways of the lands which they are trying to escape, are going to end up with the same, sad situations that made them willing to leave all that they had known, for a wild, and full of danger new country. I have looked all over the internet for the exact quote (because Taylor Sheridan’s writing is more eloquent and divine than mine), but I wasn’t able to find it. In short, the conversation was making clear, the old adage, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

I jotted this quote down the other day:

“If you desire to make a difference in the world, you must be different from the world.” @DukeHomer, Twitter

Change is a deliberate process. And change is never easy. Real changes start from deep inside of oneself, and it is these internal changes that start reflecting real change in the externals of our lives. To make real change, you must change the way you think about things. To make real change, you must be capable of honest self reflection. To make changes in your life, you must stop reflecting on what you do not want, what you do not like, what is bad, and you must pivot all of these thoughts to what you do want, what you do like, and what is the good for which you are aiming to achieve. Once you have decided what you are aiming towards, you can then create the steps that you must take, in order to create this real change in your life. To make real lasting change, you must put all of your focus back onto yourself, the only person whom you are ever capable of changing.

We all have done this process of change in our lives. Most of us have moved out of our homes and away from our families of origin, and we have created our own families and homes and daily lives. We have taken the habits, and the customs, and the traditions that we liked about our families of origin, and we deliberately included them in our own lives and homes and families, and yet, on the other hand, we have done some things differently from where and whom we came from, because these things no longer served nor resonated with our adult selves and the families and the lives we desire to have and to experience.

Change is very much a conscious act. Change is sometimes thrust upon us when we experience a major lifestyle change or suffer a loss in our lives, such as a death of a loved one, or a major illness, or a severed relationship, or the empty nest, or a job loss. However, it is how we react to any of these situations that will make the difference between a true, healthy, growing, metamorphic change happening for us in our lives, versus if we struggle and fight against a change, with the fruitless idea of being able to keep things always the same, and under our own individual control.

Real change is purposeful and it is not easy. But deliberate reflection, and then taking the steps for meaningful change, is what gives our lives more purpose and more meaning and more vitality and more satisfaction than just about any other experience that we have in our lives. To create meaningful change in our own lives, reminds us of our own individual power and our freedom to be exactly who we are individually meant to be. To make change, is to be the deliberate creators of this world which we share. We were all given the ability to make changes in our lives, but the desire for change has to be strong enough for us to take the first difficult steps, and then to take the the many more steady, willful, confident, vision-filled steps to achieve the difference we want in our lives, and thus, the difference that we ultimately want our lives to be, in the greater world around us.

36 Best Quotes About Change - Wise Words About Transitions

101 Quotes About Change in Life - Inspirational Change Quotes

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Don’t Care

“We’ve been suckered into thinking we must have an opinion on everything. There’s just so much I don’t care about.” – Annie Hatfield, Twitter, @HatfieldAnne

I read this yesterday and it resonated completely with me. My opinion is that this tweet is so good, that I had to stop, drop and roll to one of my sacred notebooks and jot this keen insight down immediately.

In today’s world, it’s awfully hard to admit that “you just don’t care” about many things, isn’t it? But I wasn’t the only one who related to this tweet. So far, it has gotten almost 2500 likes in less than 24 hours. Perhaps we will all be cancelled, or labelled “stupid” or “callous” or “blasé” or “ignorant.”

When I do care about something, I care deeply and passionately and fervently. When I do care about someone or something, there will be no questioning it. You will know. I’m full of fire. If I put that kind of care and energy into everything, I would have burned myself out long ago.

When I was a teenager, my father told me that if I was going to take a stand on something, I had better make sure that it is something that I believe in and care about with every fiber of my being. And then he said to make sure that I learn everything that I can about whatever hill I am standing on, including all the insights and counter-insights to my beliefs about said subject.

I believe that my father was correct, and so to have a strong opinion on something, takes a lot of work, a great deal of personal insight and self-awareness, plenty of research and a big dollop of empathy. And it takes the ability to be open-minded enough to have your opinion changed, if growth and knowledge occurs over time and experience. In short, strong opinions require strength, passion, wisdom and humility.

I have always believed that “variety is the spice of life.” I am grateful that there are people who care passionately about subjects that I don’t care about. I am thrilled that there are tribes of people for every phenomenon on this earth, so that people can commune with others and share a common love and vision and passion together. This is what makes the world such an interesting place where we can all pick and choose as to what to dabble in, and what to care about, and what to create strong opinions about. If we all do our parts to resolutely care about at least a couple of things that matter to us, we’ve got enough hands on deck to make sure that all of our bases are covered.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

The Guilty

My husband and I just finished up the fourth season of “The Sinner.” It’s a great show. I highly recommend it. Without giving too much away, a character in this recent season tells the detective, Harry (who is the protagonist in all seasons of “The Sinner”) that his guilty feelings are coming from his ego. This perked my ears. When we feel guilt, we often like to believe that this guilt comes from the most holy part of our conscious, but this is not necessarily always the case. Appropriate guilt energizes us to make amends and to do better, but many of us walk around with quite a bit of unsubstantiated guilt, which isn’t doing anything for anyone. This kind of guilt veers dangerously into the territory of shame.

We love to say that “so and so” made me feel guilty. Yet, we all have heard and intellectualized the statement that no one can make us feel anything. Our feelings are ours to own. Our reactions to other’s actions, are all our reactions to deal with, and to explore. People can be manipulative and conniving and they can try to play on our emotions, but it is up to us to explore our emotions and reactions, in order to understand where these emotions and reactions are coming from. These emotions are all ours. It is up to us to decide whether pleasing or disappointing someone else is really our responsibility and further, are their reactions to our choices really our responsibility, either? Appropriate guilt is when you have done something morally wrong and against your code of character. Inappropriate guilt truly does come from an oversized ego that believes that it is responsible for all the happiness in the world. Inappropriate guilt keeps us feeling responsible for living for other people, making us believe that we must be who they want us to be, and do what they expect us to do, in order for them to be happy. Our ego says that we have the power to make other people happy, but the hard truth is, none of us are that powerful. Happiness is an inside job for each individual. People getting what they want may bring a temporary relief to them, and a temporary relief to our sense of “guilt and responsibility”, but in the end we all are in control of our own feelings which come from our thoughts and our perspectives on what is happening in our own lives.

Sometimes we think that feeling guilty makes us better people, but guilt is really a useless emotion if it doesn’t inspire us to make healthy changes in our lives. Wallowing around in guilt, doesn’t help us, nor anyone else. We think that carrying around guilt is a form of punishment for what we have done, but this carrying around guilt is not doing anything for anyone. This act is useless. And with this realization, it becomes interesting to explore the tie of ego to guilt. We must really think that we are big, important stuff if “we are guilty” for all of the pains in the world, or even for all of the pains in our small corner of the world. Ego loves to make us feel more important and significant than we really are, in the overall scheme of things.

Those of us who feel a lot of “guilt”, like to believe that we are good caring people who worry about everyone’s feelings. We like to believe that we are “good” people who feel connected to all of those around us. I remember the first “aha” moments, when my “saintly side” was figuring out that she was more tied to her outsized ego, than she would like to believe herself to be. I started to come to realize that I was personalizing others’ rude behavior towards me. I believed that others’ nastiness was all saved up for me, until I started noticing that most other people were also at the receiving end of these same damaged people’s mean and nasty and passive aggressive, underhanded behavior. In other words, their behavior wasn’t all about me. I wasn’t the center of the universe. Mean people’s meanness is about them. I’m not a special target.

So, in this same light of understanding, this kind of “aha moment” came back to me watching “The Sinner” the other night. Feeling guilty and responsible for other people’s happiness and their feelings, is much about my own ego. It makes me feel powerful to think that I am in control of how other people feel. Ewwww. Once again, reminder to self: I am not the all-powerful, center of the universe.

To distinguish between appropriate guilt and inappropriate guilt, ask yourself these questions: What have I done wrong? Is someone feeling disappointed truly my responsibility? What would I expect of others if the roles were reversed? Am I responsible or even capable to make anyone feel anything?

If you come to the conclusion that you have actually done something harmful and wrong, apologize, make amends where you can, accept the consequences to your actions, and let it go. Carrying around a big bag of guilt is not going to do anything helpful and positive for anyone. And if you realize that you are feeling inappropriate guilt, remind yourself to tame your ego. You are not the grand wizard of fixing everyone’s feelings. Simply put, you are not that powerful. Put the focus back where it should be, on the only person’s feelings and perspectives you have any control over: your own.

15 Guilt Quotes ideas | quotes, inspirational quotes, me quotes

21 Guilt Quotes, Inspirational Words of Wisdom

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Monday-Funday

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Friends, please don’t take today too seriously. Check your expectations at the door. Use today to get comfortable with expressing your love – your love for your loved ones, for your pets, for your life, for yourself. Use today to say “I love you” to someone who really needs to hear it (even if it is the person staring right back at you in the mirror). Readers, I loved you yesterday, I love you today and I will love you tomorrow. Love is.

“You will be happier when you do things from love, not for love.” -@Motivation___Qu___ (Twitter)

“Never let anyone treat you like regular glue. You’re glitter glue.” – YourTango

Soul Sunday

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday!!! There is something poetic about a day that almost all of our country gets at least a little bit excited about experiencing. Even if you don’t love football, there’s the food, the camaraderie, the rivalry, the half-time show and of course, my personal favorite, the commercials!! There is no other day in the year that I look forward to commercials. That’s what makes Super Bowl Sunday so special.

My regular readers know that Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. Poetry is the language of our deeper depths. There is no other form of writing that marries your own personal projections, with the words that you are reading more than poetry does. In that sense, every poem that you read, is completely personal to you. Every poem is yours.

Here is my poem for today. I was inspired to write it from a picture I took yesterday when we were boating.

The dream journal states that water is the symbol of your deepest emotional depths,

And the sky is the symbol for the infinite and the sublime, the start of Heaven’s steps,

So on the days, when it is difficult to fully discern and yet, to try

To understand what scarcely separates the tranquil water from the mystifying sky,

These are the days of the calmest, sweet ecstasy, known to life on Earth.

Days when the experience leads to a profound Knowing and yet also to mirth.

These are the days of holy wholeness, when all separation disappears.

And the peaceful wisdom of the depths and the heights, clears one of all of her fears.

“Our minds create everything: the beautiful mountaintop, brilliant with snow, is yourself when you contemplate it.”
~ Tich Nhat Han

What a Writer Wants

I saw this quote on Twitter today and I thought, “Wow, I do love Nicole Lyons because she just so eloquently expressed the hopes of most of us writers.” When I think of who I would love to have met in person from the past, Mark Twain always comes to mind and even Oscar Wilde. I so admire clever writers. When I am watching a movie or reading a book or even noticing a fun quote from Twitter, and I see a line that just says exactly how I feel in the most relevant, interesting, “damn, you just captivated that enormous feeling and sensation in one simple, profound sentence”, I am in perfect awe.

I wonder if we would be disappointed by our favorite authors, though. Comedians are often the most depressed people among us. (probably because they are so good at pinpointing all of the absurdities of life that the rest of us so blissfully ignore) They aren’t always “on” and I think that comedians often resent their own humorous talents for the expectations that these innate gifts create. I believe that most of us who love to write are introverts. I, myself, am an extremely friendly introvert. People don’t believe that I am an introvert because I’m friendly and “perky”. But I am a friendly, perky person who likes to spend a lot of her time with her friendly, perky self. I express myself much better when I write. My mind is always on overdrive so that when I speak, I think that what I say, often comes out kind of confusing and jumbled and ditzy and regrettably, many times, too direct. But when I write, I understand myself distinctly. When I write, I discover my most authentic, vulnerable self. So, it is true, as Nicole Lyons states, that when I write, I share my barest soul with you, my beloved readers. Thank you for treating it so kindly and respectfully.

A. A. Milne Quote: A writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence.

The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respec... Quote by Leo. C Rosten - QuotesLyfe

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Friday Faux Fur

Happy Friday, friends! I have an early appointment this morning, so I am going to have to make this a short post. On Fridays on the blog, I keep to the superficial stuff in life, and I typically list three things, or products, or songs, or TV shows, or books, or movies, that have made my life more fun and interesting. In the interest of time, I will only be listing one favorite of mine today: faux fur purses.

I live in Florida and I carry around a faux fur purse, so you can, too. And you should! I am currently carrying around my very luxurious, super soft and cuddly Anita Bitardi faux fur purse and it is fabulous. I get so many compliments on it. People just can’t help themselves wanting to touch it. I keep myself and others warm with it (for instance the girls tennis team took turns cuddling against it, at yesterday’s extra long tennis match that went until dark). My friend told me that I should get a sign for it: “Emotional Support Purse.” (but really ladies, aren’t all of our purses “Emotional Support Purses”?)

Seriously, though, I bought my first amazing faux fur bag when I was in my thirties and I was living in Charlotte, NC. The area which I lived in, had one of those super cool, old-fashioned, Ace Hardware stores reminiscent of Little House on the Prairie, that still had a post office inside of it. I loved wandering around in that store, perusing the “what-I-might-finds.” One day, I noticed something furry on the bottom shelf in a dark corner in the store. Honestly, it startled me. I thought that it was some sort of animal. So when I went to investigate, I pulled out a fabulous faux fur backpack. I loved that bag!! I used it every single winter until the fur got worn off and the rest of the fur was all bunched together in clumps. (In other words, I used it way past its expiration date.) I think that I might have cried when I finally threw that backpack in the garbage can, ten years later, here in Florida.

From that moment of finding my first glorious faux fur backpack, I have made a point of carrying around a faux fur bag every single winter. It is so comforting (my other friend said I could use my current faux fur bag as a pillow on a trip.) I look forward to the first cold days when it seems mildly appropriate to start carrying a faux fur bag around, and then I carry it around for a long, long while until the days when the fur really starts to look a little bit ridiculous with my shorts.

You need a faux fur bag. Trust me on this. The groundhog says we have several more weeks of winter, so treat yourself! Have a great weekend. See you tomorrow!!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Relax, Relax, Relax

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. - Albert Einstein

Isn’t this a wonderful time in the world to be a curious person? Thank you, Google. National Geographic used to be a stack of weirdly thick, yellow framed magazines on my grandfather’s coffee table. Today, National Geographic is not only a magazine, but also a website and a streaming channel. Never has information been so vividly and easily accessible to us, in our lives. We all can be Einsteins if we want to be. It turns out that Einstein and Curious George had a lot in common.

Einstein also said this:

“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”

I love this phenomenon, don’t you? It is thought that some of our greatest insights and answers come to us in our dreams, when we are at our most relaxed and not desperately turning the wheels in our minds. That’s why it is always suggested to have a tablet right by our bedsides, to jot down the wisdoms from our dreams when we wake up.

When we were in San Francisco a few years ago, my husband purchased me a jade bangle from the Chinatown district. Chinese people have prized jade for over 7000 years. They consider jade to be a living force which protects the wearer and they even believe that jade has some healing properties. It is a wonderful souvenir from that particular trip. The jade bangles do not have clasps, and you want the bangle to just be slightly bigger than your wrist, or otherwise it is annoying to have the bracelet slide up and down on your arm too much, and bang on everything in sight. Therefore, due to their tight fit, the jade bangles will not slide on to your wrist when you are too rigid and uptight, and trying to force them over your hand. “Relax, relax, relax” is all that the shopkeeper kept repeating to me as I was desperately trying to try on my bangle, like one of Cinderella’s sisters trying to stuff her foot into the glass slipper. So, finally, taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes, I let my thoughts float away, and then, I slowly opened my eyes, only to see and to feel the jade bangle sitting nicely on my wrist. (and then I started panicking about getting it off of my wrist, but that is another story for a different blogpost.)

Maybe today is a good day to “relax, relax, relax.” Maybe today is a good day not to force anything, but instead let the answers, and the inspirations, and the guidance float over to us, only to set nicely into our hearts. It took me a long time to figure out that I will never be able to outrun any of my dogs, but if I just stay calm, and I stand in place, with a gentle, knowing confidence, my dogs always run right back to me. Perhaps that is the same with “the truth.” If the truth came to Einstein in this fashion, it will work for us in the same way. Maybe the truth never left any of us. Perhaps, we just haven’t been relaxed enough, to let the truth bubble up slowly to the surface.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Your Story/Plot Twist

People have commented to me more than once, that they are amazed that I write consistently, practically every single day, at least one sentence, on this blog. I do like to believe that I am a reliable, loyal, consistent person. I think that to get really good at anything, you must do it consistently. Certainly, I do like the idea of this blog being a comfort to those who come here every single day, to ponder along with me. The thought of our virtual, intimate commune, fills me with a form of deep and grateful contentment.

That being said, as fulfilling it is to have readers and to have others validate my musings, I do this blogging for me. It is not a chore. It is not even a purposeful, daily practice. Writing is one of my greatest joys and pleasures. When I am writing, it is the part of my day that I feel most fully myself. My writing time is probably the most sacred time of my day. I can’t wait to get up and write in the morning. I get giddy thinking about what I am going to write about next. Writing is my passion and I now realize that I let it remain dormant for much too long a time in my life. Throughout the years, my desire to write would try to force itself out, pushing through the doors, in the form in extra long emails to my friends and my family, in flowery work memos at my part-time jobs, in extra-descriptive posts about items that I was selling on eBay, and in half-started journals along the way. But I didn’t really open the door wide open to my passion for writing, until 2018, when I was 48-years-old. I didn’t surrender to my muse despite all of its gentle nudging and subtle hints sent along my way. I didn’t allow my longing to write to become a priority, until I decided that I would have to do it, or bust.

What is lying dormant in you? It is never too late to open the lid, pull it out, dust it off, throw away all of the old crusty criticisms from yourself and from others, and just do it. Just bask in it. Have a reunion with your deepest longings. Feel the joy of reconnecting with that which makes you feel more alive than anything. If you feel a stirring, but you are not sure what that stirring is, look for clues. What makes you curious? What gets your most rapt attention? What did you love to do as a child? What did you love to do that you shut down long ago, because someone else put it down? What is something you liked to do, but you stopped doing it, because you were afraid of stealing the spotlight from someone else with the same interest and talent (i.e. “my brother is the musician in the family”)? Whose talents do you most admire? What do people remark about what is special and unique and interesting about you? What are you quick to volunteer to do? What are things that you do, that when you do them, time stands still? These are the breadcrumbs that will lead you back to your passionate self. And remember, it doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing or how they are doing it. This world would be an incredibly dull, uninspiring, unstimulating place if we all liked and did the same things, in the same routine way. Start a love affair with your deepest self today. It is never too late. The recommitment ceremony in your heart will be incredibly beautiful, and it will be one of the best feelings you have felt in a long time.

“It’s your story. Feel free to hit ’em with a plot twist at any moment.” – Think Smarter, Twitter

Michael Hyatt Quote: “Consistency is better than perfection. We can all be consistent-perf ection is

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.