changes Archives - Adulting: Second- Half

Thoughts for Thursday

+ I’ve been complaining a lot in real life, and also even here on the blog, about how “stuck” certain situations seem to be in my life. I’ve often heard organization gurus talk about how clearing out your living space helps to bring movement to “stuck” energy, and I know this, in my heart, to be true. Yesterday, I got proof. I’ve spent most of this week, cleaning out some closets and organizing my things, and that in itself has felt amazing. (Why do we put this chore off when we know just how good that it feels when completed??) Anyway, two small situations in my life that had felt a little angsty and “hopeless” to me, miraculously turned around yesterday. If you feel “stuck”, put that irritation and angst away for a little while, and instead go all in with cleaning out a couple of your drawers, or a shelf, or a closet. As within, so without.

+ Dr. Nicole LePera recently wrote this Tweet on Twitter:

LIFE ACCOMPLISHMENTS THAT GO UNNOTICED: 1. Being happy in your marriage 2. Taking a pay cut to do a job you love 3. Making a major life shift at 50 or 60 4. Enjoying your own company 5. Being able to say “no” comfortably 6. Using your gifts to help others 7. Divorce from a dysfunctional situation.

Isn’t this the truth? I know many people who are financially/professionally successful. But I know a lot less people who have accomplished any or all of the things listed above. These things are rare accomplishments because they require a lot of self-awareness, prioritizing, sacrifice, authenticity and bravery. And interestingly, these accomplishments listed above, are what often brings the most intrinsic satisfaction to one’s life. Bravo, to my courageous, dedicated friends and readers, who can count yourself as accomplishing at least one of those items on Dr. LePera’s list! Your accomplishments do not go unnoticed. They are admired, respected and appreciated.

+ I read an interesting article recently that talked about when we are going through a big change in our lives (such as empty nest, relationship changes, job changes, etc), we have a tendency to want to torch everything to the ground, and to start fresh, but this is a major mistake for most. Our everyday routines give us structure and predictability, in a world that often appears chaotic. Our daily routines help us to stay disciplined, feel purposeful, and they stop us from ruminating and overthinking. When going through major changes in our lives, it is best to stick with the routine, but also to “watch” ourselves in it. What needs tweaking? What could be added? What could be let go? You’ll learn more about yourself, by observing yourself right where you are, than chucking it all, to go meditating on a mountain in a different, exotic country. And when you do decide to go on your mountaintop meditation journey, you’ll already know exactly who you are, and you’ll have brought your healthiest, wisest self with you, in order to just enjoy the major change and the sensations that you’re experiencing.

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

Fresh Starts With Results

Yesterday I wrote about the fresh start of spring. We get a lot of “fresh starts” in life, don’t we? New year, new season, new day . . . . the question is, do we make the most of our frequent fresh starts? Moving to a new location, or taking a new job, or getting a new pet, may all infuse new, exciting, hopeful energy into our lives, but as the saying goes, “wherever you go, there you are.” Without being deliberately conscious about the changes that we want to have with our “new starts”, and without being honest with ourselves about the things that we have to do differently, in order to go towards the direction of what we do want, we constantly get a reiteration of “same old, same old”, in just slightly different forms.

Thomas Jefferson (see quote above) and our forefathers had a vision for a country the likes the world had never seen before. This is what the site of The White House (whitehouse.gov) has to say about the Constitutional Convention:

“A chief aim of the Constitution as drafted by the Convention was to create a government with enough power to act on a national level, but without so much power that fundamental rights would be at risk. One way that this was accomplished was to separate the power of government into three branches, and then to include checks and balances on those powers to assure that no one branch of government gained supremacy. This concern arose largely out of the experience that the delegates had with the King of England and his powerful Parliament. The powers of each branch are enumerated in the Constitution, with powers not assigned to them reserved to the States.”

Our forefathers took what they did not like about what they experienced from the governments that they came from (too much power for one entity), and they used this to create a new way of governing (spreading and dividing power), “in order to form a more perfect union” (from the U.S.’s Constitution’s preamble). To be clear, I am not using this blog to create a political debate as to the beginning, and the current state of “our more perfect union.” If you are wanting a political debate, you have come to the wrong blog. I am simply using this example, and Jefferson’s quote to show the more practical, useful ways any of us can create our own true fresh start, in any area of our own individual lives.

If you want to make changes in your own life, first examine what bothers you in your current life. Explore each area. Your health, your relationships, your finances, your job, how you spend your leisure time, where you live, etc. are all categories to explore and to register your own satisfaction. If you find yourself feeling upset in one or more of these categories, think about what it is that you don’t like, but then (and this is key) pivot what you don’t like, into what you do want instead. We are all good at getting ourselves stuck, complaining about the things which we don’t like in our lives. Many of us have held onto the same complaints for years and years. However, what we forget, when we do this fruitless complaining, is that no change comes from this. If anything, the same old/same old gets even more amplified from the attention and the energy which we are giving to it. What we resist, persists. Resistance and frustration create a lot of energy and focus and give even more “life” to what we don’t like, and to what we don’t want in our lives. We all can complain ad nauseum, and in great detail about what the problems are in our lives, but we often forget to take the next step, which is to pivot these complaints into what do we want instead. If we don’t like how much we weigh, then what it is that we do want, is to be thinner and healthier. What are small steps which we can do differently, to move us towards what we do want? If we don’t like how are relationships feel in our lives, what are steps we can take to make our relationships healthy for us? We decided that we do want healthier relationships, so what does “healthier relationships” look like for us? Better communication? Moving on from toxic relationships? Reaching out to meet more people who share our interests? You get the picture.

Be honest with yourself where you really want your fresh starts in your life. Perhaps you really love your complaints, and you are attached to them, and the “victim status” in the areas which these problems give that status/mentality to you. That’s okay. If you are radically honest with yourself in this way, at least you realize that what you are complaining about actually gives you a payoff that you like, and that you want to keep in your life. What you are complaining about, you may actually be attached to, and therefore you like it, in your own weird way. Again, that’s okay. At least you know the truth about yourself, and your favorite gripes. But there are likely other areas in your life, where you really want to get that fresh start energy going, and make it into something new, and different, and better in your life. Figure out what it is that you don’t like, and what you don’t want, and turn that into a statement of what you do like and what you do want, instead. Then, write down small steps you can take, that can head you into the direction that you do want to head to, going forward. Be brave. Be consistent. Be focused on what you do want. “If you want something you never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.”

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

Cycles

When endings come in life either through death, or divorce, or moving to a new house, or changing jobs, or children growing up, I’ve come to understand how complicated the grief of this situation can be. When endings come, you don’t just grieve the loss of the person, or the loss of the place, or the loss of the thing, you also grieve the loss of yourself that has identified strongly with that person, or that place or that thing, or that function, or that title. Even though we are human beings, there is a huge part of us who identifies ourselves by what we do, and we label ourselves accordingly. For me, I have many labels: I am a wife, mother, daughter, sister, niece, cousin, in-law, friend, homemaker, writer/blogger, American, Florida resident, JMU graduate, UF parent, Pittsburgh native, avid reader, dog owner, animal lover, boater, walker, mentor, deep thinker, adventurer, brown-eyed girl . . . . The point that I am making is that any of these labels that I identify myself as, can change (and have changed over the years) through death, moves, job changes, health changes, relationship changes, aging, world events (hello, 9/11 and the pandemic) etc. So when we are having a hard time letting go of someone, something, or some place, a lot of that difficulty of letting go, is the letting go of that function, or that label that connects us to the person, the place, the pet, the job, the house, the title etc. In order to let go, it feels like we almost have to cut off a piece of our own selves, that is still clinging to make this part of our lives, an ongoing part of our present circumstances. We have a hard time surrendering this person, place, or function, or thing, to our past, because we still desperately want it to be part of our present. We aren’t ready to sever that part of ourselves.

With the ailing of our extended family member, I’ve been reflecting a lot on grief and why it is so hard and unique to each individual. A lot of how hard you grieve someone or something, is how much you sunk your whole self into a relationship or a situation. When endings come around, you have to face that the definition of whatever you are grieving – the relationship, the place, the role, is soon coming to a close. There is no going back and changing it and making it different anymore. It is what it is, becomes the final statement. And so when you are packing up your things from your desk, or when you are turning in your keys, or you are signing your divorce papers, or you are attending a graduation, or a retirement party, or a funeral, you are giving away a little chunk of yourself. You are closing out a chapter on YOU. And that is so incredibly hard.

There are so many endings in life. Life is cyclic in nature. Summer is soon coming to a close. Many people have already experienced their long anticipated summer vacations. And there is grief in these facts, for many people. But as the saying goes, for every ending, there is a new beginning. I can’t wait for the cooler weather of fall and even the overload of pumpkin spice everything. I hate saying good-bye to anything or anyone important to me, but I also love anticipating fresh, new hellos to what’s next in my life, and the new pieces of myself that these new, fresh hellos will reveal to me.

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” – Frank Herbert

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

We all know that change is the only constant, but change usually does come in quite subtly, doesn’t it? The few, shocking, sometimes devastating, “change your life in a moment” times, are thankfully pretty rare, but at least those changes are obvious.

We just made the last payment of our second son’s undergraduate college education. He graduates from college this April. Two down, two to go. It’s surreal, reflecting on that fact. There is a long period of time when your kids are in their elementary school/middle school ages, that you think that things are never going to change. Each year seems mostly “the same old/same old”, until your first child goes to high school. From then on, the changes go into warp speed. (Interestingly, the changes in my face and my body, seemed to have gone into warp speed, at the same time that my kids started into their high school and college years. Everything is interconnected, right? It’s so not fair.)

We’ve all gotten a hard lesson in change this past year, haven’t we? A lot of these changes have more of the “in your face” variety. (you remember your face, right? It’s that part of your body which spends a lot of its waking hours underneath a mask.) What have these past year’s changes, changed in you? What have you learned about yourself this past year? What has changed for the better? What has changed for the worse? What changes would you like to see in yourself and in the world, going forward? These are the questions which I am pondering for myself, lately.

Image result for best quotes about change

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

Hey Friend

“I’ve decided my 2019 will start on February 1st. January is a free trial month.” – Daily Positive Information

My friend sent the above quote to our group chat the other day. I love it. I find it to be very true. I always feel like a racehorse at the starting gate on the first days of the year, eager to gallop towards my goals and ambitions and desired changes, but usually right around this time, I feel slowed, muddled and frustrated. I read something recently about the fact that most successful CEOs only schedule about 40-50% of their time because they are fully aware that interruptions and diversions and surprises are the likely to happen, in the course of any particular day.

It seems that when we consider our resolutions or at the very least, our intentions for the year, we sometimes get so excited that we forget that life still happens. We envision going full tilt on our dreams and visions, forgetting that all of the mundane still needs to be addressed. Haircuts, car repairs, getting sick, taxes, grocery shopping etc. are all facts of life that aren’t going to disappear so we can fully focus on just what ignites our passions. Maybe that is why resolutions/intentions are so quickly put by the wayside. Maybe it is better to start the year, fully accepting that 40-50% of our time is probably already taken up by the banal, day-to-day, need-to-dos in our lives. Our job is to make sure that we are filling that other 50-60% with the stuff that makes our hearts sing. Maybe this natural slowing down of our excitement for change and growth is a healthy thing, to make sure that we are headed in the directions that we really want to go to, in our lives.

“Hey friend, don’t you dare forget, as you are creating a new you, that there’s a whole lot about the old you that is worth keeping.” – Toni Sorenson