Are you passing on love, or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
An Irish Blessing:
May your troubles be less,
Your blessings be more,
And may nothing but happiness
Come through your door.
My next door neighbors are having extensive work done on the back side of their home. It is proving to be a very long and drawn out process, as most major house projects have the tendency to go. Sometimes this annoys me to tears, and yet other times, I get a charge out of the situation. The current workers are a happy lot. They play upbeat Hispanic music and they sing along to it. Sometimes, when I hear them, outside of my window, I get the feeling of staying in a Caribbean resort, where from your room, you can faintly hear the steel drum band and people laughing casually down at the pool bar area. It’s an oddly relaxing, and comforting feeling. I think that this is the blessing of living many years – your collection of experiences can generate a lot of happy memories, just when you need them. I recognize that the opposite is also true. You take the good with the bad, I suppose.
Some parts of my neighbor’s house project have been brought down to the studs. I am very curious to see what they will build back up. In many ways, our own collective lives have been brought down to the studs, too, with this pandemic. What will we build back up? Since I have lived for over fifty years now, I have had a few personal experiences with my life being taken back down to the proverbial studs. I’ve mentioned before that my family likes to joke that we were “the poster kids” for the banking crisis. We checked every box. Still, honestly, the life which we built back up from that crisis in our family’s life, has been incredible and perhaps my favorite chapter in my life. The clearing of the plate, allowed us to be very deliberate in choosing what to put back on to it. A clean slate has a lot of clarity to it.
Now that things are moving in the direction of opening back up, I hope that I remember to be intentional about doing what is truly important to me. I hope that I remember not to clutter my life back up with experiences that are relatively meaningless and time consuming, just because . . .
