The Whisper

“Stay close to anything that makes you feel glad to be alive.” – Hafiz

Before I start with the theme that I am going with on the blog today, I overheard something on a podcast that made me spend some time pondering. The question announced was, “Are you getting older or are you growing older?” Being in the middle of one of those birthday clumps in my own family and also in my extended family, it has become quite apparent to me lately, that we are all getting older. There is no choice in that, but growing older sounds so much more progressive in a healthy way. Growing older puts me in mind of a stately old tree that has weathered many storms and yet still reaches for the sky with young, earnest branches, even with its roots running deep and spread far out. Getting older sounds so much more passive and resigned, like a frumpy old piece of furniture, decaying just by sitting there and doing nothing.

But enough of that . . . . Today I have a few new exhibits for our thought museum here at Adulting – Second Half. Most of these exhibits belong in the same room. They center around the idea of “intuition.” Intuition is less, “What do you think about this?” and more, “What do you feel about this?” Here are the exhibits:

+ “Intuition is the sum of all of the times you’ve ever trusted yourself.” The paradox of this is, the more that you trust yourself, the stronger your intuition.

+ “Your path is more well-lighted than you have been allowing yourself to realize.” – Esther Hicks

+ “Having a fear of things going wrong is totally normal, but it’s not the same as having intuition or information that things will go wrong.” – Jessica Lanyandoo So, in other words, do not confuse fear for intuition. Intuition is generally calmer, quieter, clearer, less mutable and more confident than fear.

+ “Prayer is not asking. It is the longing of the soul. . . . It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” – Mahatma Ghandi

+ “There is a close relationship between truth and trust.” – Mister Rogers

+ “Honesty: When your outer expression matches your inner belief. Truth: When your inner belief matches reality.” – Alan Cohen

+ “Are you listening to yourself or are you listening to the story you told yourself?”

Think of all of the times in your life, when you “just knew.” You didn’t always follow that “just knowing”, but the times that you did follow it, even when it was hard, even when it went against logic or others’ opinions, you were so happy that you listened to yourself. Then there are the times which we all can recall, when we didn’t follow our intuition, and it lead us to some regret. But the beautiful thing is, our intuition never gives up on us. It never gets snide and stubborn, angrily folding its arms, blasting us with, “You never listen to me! So forget it. I’ll never help you again.” Our intuition is always there, with its calm, sweet, all-knowing, quiet, wise demeanor inside of us, like a well-spring, or a candlelight that never gets extinguished, always ready to help lead us, even when we ignored it 14 times in a row. Our intuition will happily lead us to the next right step again and again and again, without admonishing us for disregarding it. What a lovely, unconditional gift implanted inside each one of us! Have you checked in with your intuition today?

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

Prayers for Peace

My prayers are for the Ukrainian people, particularly the children. May their fears be snuffed out by the peace of a strong faith and the perseverance of endless hope. My prayers are for our world leaders. May these leaders only hear and react to the quiet wisdom and guidance that is imparted to all of us by the Divine, for the highest good of us all. May peace reign.

Gandhi quote "The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace"

“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” – Malcom X

“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” – Black Elk

“I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.” – Helen Keller

“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations… entangling alliances with none.” – Thomas Jefferson

“Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.” – Elie Wiesel

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

God Bless You, Friday

My son was telling me a story about one of his science professors. She is a strict, brilliant German woman. She is currently teaching him Organic Chemistry 2. He said that the most interesting trait about her is that no matter what is going on in the class, no matter if she is in mid-discussion of a highly complicated subject or demonstrating a lab experiment, if someone sneezes in the class, she stops and says, “God bless you.” My son said that this has become such an obvious trait of hers, that he sometimes thinks that students fake sneeze on purpose, in order to get her blessing. I love that story! It clearly demonstrates the truth of the saying that what people will remember about you won’t be as much about what you said, your brilliance, your looks or your possessions, but more so, how you made them feel.

On that happy note, “God bless you, readers!!” It’s Friday, the easiest day of the week to feel blessed!!! Here at Adulting Second Half we call Friday – “Favorite Things Friday”! I typically list at least three favorite things, songs, websites, videos, books, etc. that have added positive vibes to my life and I encourage you all to do the same in the Comments section. (please feel free to Comment on anything, any time. I see the stats, I know that you are out there – I would LOVE to hear from you!) Please check out previous Friday posts for other favorites.

Today’s favorites are all quotes. I took these from a list of 77 of supposedly the world’s most popular quotes. I narrowed that list down to my favorites (at least for this Friday)! Here goes:

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
– Dr. Seuss

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
– Oscar Wilde

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
– C.S. Lewis

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
– Marilyn Monroe

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
– Albert Einstein

“If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”
– Malcolm X

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
– Helen Keller

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”
– J.K. Rowling

“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
– Abraham Lincoln

And to end with where we started:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou

Happy Friday, friends!! God Bless You!! Thank you for blessing my life and making me feel heard, interesting, and worth your time!!