inspiration Archives - Page 41 of 81 - Adulting: Second- Half

Formula For Peace

“Expecting to be happy all the time is a root cause of much unhappiness.” – Dr. Nicole LePera

Expectations will always getcha, right? A wise person once told me to “never ‘should’ on yourself.” I think that this tweet by Dr. LePera is particularly apropos during the holidays. There is such an expectation to be “merry and bright” all of the time, and so, if you aren’t feeling this way, it makes you feel even more down and inadequate. Or sometimes you feel like it is your responsibility to make your loved ones’ holiday happiness come true, and this is not even possible. We can add to people’s happiness with kindness, but everyone’s own feelings are their own unique responsibility and capability.

If you take a moment to really become self-aware, you’ll notice that your feelings are often quite fleeting. If you stop right now, and think to yourself, “What am I feeling?” even if you think that the answer is “feeling nothing” or “feeling blank” or “feeling peaceful”, notice this. This “absence of feeling” is a feeling, too. What does “feeling nothing” feel like in your body? Does anything hurt? What is your breathing like? Now think a thought of something that makes you angry. Where does the feeling of anger creep up in your body? What are the bodily sensations of anger? Now think of something that makes you feel sad. Notice these sensations. Now realize how many different feelings and emotions, and the sensations that come with these feelings, have happened to you, in your body, in probably less than a minute. Don’t be stingy with yourself. Think of people, or things, or events, that make you feel happy, or filled with excited anticipation, and notice the sensations that come with these thoughts, too.

Feelings cycle throughout our being, all day long. Certain feelings can seem more passionate or dominant or stubbornly set, depending on the day, and our perceptions of what happened during the day, but if we get really curious about ourselves, we will notice the constant subtle shifting of our feelings throughout the day. Sometimes feelings occur because we are hungry, or physically ill or hurt, and we then use our minds to start making up stories about these physical sensations, in order to justify them, which only adds to the storm of emotion. If we just take a little time to notice and to accept our feelings as they come, we will see how easily they pass on through.

Just for today, be in detached acceptance of yourself and however you feel. Check in with yourself on the hour, and see if you can name and describe what feelings you are experiencing at that time of the day. Describe to yourself what the feeling’s sensations are in your body. Notice if any thoughts or states of being (hungry, sick, tired etc.) are adding some intensity to your emotional state. Just for today, be okay and content with yourself, in whatever emotional state you are in, and extend this courtesy to the other people whom you encounter throughout the day. Be an unpressured, detached observer. Don’t try to change yourself, and don’t try to change anyone else. Drop all of your expectations. Interestingly, by doing this, you may very well start experiencing the feelings of a deep, lasting, calming peace. Peace and contentment are some of the most comfortable feelings in the world to experience. By cutting yourself a break, and also letting go of trying to control others and their feelings, you may give yourself the gift of feeling “peace and contentment” more than you have felt these feelings in a long time. And isn’t “peace” what we universally wish for everyone whom we know and love, no matter what their outside circumstances may be? I know that we’ve gotten quite a few holiday cards offering us wishes of peace. Peace seems to be a universal desire for everyone. The answer to our own peace lies inside each one of us, and it is always available for the taking, ironically by just letting go.

“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

“Feelings are something you have; not something you are.” – Shannon L. Alder

“But feelings can’t be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.” – Anne Frank

“Emotion can be the enemy, if you give into your emotion, you lose yourself. You must be at one with your emotions, because the body always follows the mind.” – Bruce Lee

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

Hoppin’

I had my first child when I was age 25 and we kept on going, every two years or so, until we had our four children. A big family keeps you hoppin’. Many times over the years people would comment on how many loads of laundry we must do, how filled our pantry must be, how many times we must have to run the dishwasher, etc. etc. I would smile, and nod, and laugh, and say the same panned responses, again and again, but honestly, it was just my way of life. I didn’t really know anything different for most of my adult life. Yes, raising four kids was a lot. It was chaotic at times. But it was also full of fun, and adventure, and laughter, and excitement, and a menagerie of pets, to boot. It was our family’s way of life.

For the last half of the year, my husband and I have been true empty nesters. And it has been quiet, and orderly, and comfortably predictable, and we run the dishwasher maybe once a week. Our dirty laundry never piles up and there are rooms in the house that go unused and stay tidy. However, for this past week, all four kids have been home for the holidays. And I now completely understand the contrast, and why people would always comment on how many times we must go to the grocery store (this past week, it’s often been more than once a day), and how many times we must run the dishwasher (this past week, it’s been at least once a day). And I have come to realize now, that both ways of living life have their upsides (and their downsides). I see the merits in both ways of living. In the end, I mostly just feel truly privileged to get to experience and appreciate both ways of life.

“Storms draw something out of us that calm seas don’t.” ~ Bill Hybels

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

Understanding

Few people talk about the grief that comes after ending toxic relationships. Intellectually, we know it’s for the best, but we also have suffered a deep loss many don’t understand. – Dr. Nicole LePera

This was an interesting tweet by Dr. LePera that got a lot of responses of relatability. One response was so interesting that I had to put it into one of my inspirational notebooks: “Sometimes the head takes the elevator, while the heart takes the stairs.” (@sparkleandcocoa)

Relationships are complicated because people are complicated. Just like people, many relationships have their good, healthy aspects and then their not-so-healthy characteristics. Some people can have healthy, loving, mutually satisfying relationships with people whom other people find to be completely toxic. Some people make excellent mentors or teachers or siblings, or leaders, but not so good spouses, parents, or friends, and vice versa. Some people are one person’s dream partner/parent/friend/relative/neighbor, etc. and at very same time can be another person’s nightmare partner/parent/friend/relative/neighbor. It’s all relative and complicated and based on individuals’ temperaments, personalities, needs, beliefs, passions and tolerances, and how well these elements match to one another.

The loss of any relationship whether it’s due to death, or to a choice, has to be processed and grieved. Nothing is black and white. Most relationships have at least some good aspects to them. If relationships were purely toxic, they wouldn’t have likely come into fruition in the first place. When you grieve a relationship, you not only grieve “what was”, but also “what could have been.” Endings indicate a need to process “what was”. “What could be” is no longer in the cards.

I always call grief the loneliest emotion, because even if two people are grieving the same person, or the same experience, everyone has to do grief in their own way, and in their own time. No one grieves in the same manner. Usually the same loss means a different kind of loss for each individual in a relationship. What is universal however, is that never is there a more important time in the world for gentleness and kindness and understanding and empathy, then when someone is grieving.

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

Monday – Funday

As I collie lover, I couldn’t resist this one. Collies are actually patient and trusting enough to put up with this silliness. I don’t know much about cows, but they probably are, too. Animals are wonderful.

Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish readers! May it be a wonderful, meaningful experience for you.

The other day, the six of us in our family, were sitting at a picnic table eating a picnic brunch. A little boy was at a nearby table, sitting with his own family, who were much more dignified, quiet and subdued than our family. (Our family has a tendency to lean towards loud and rambunctious.)

“You’re loud and full of nonsense!” the little boy announced to us. We all laughed heartily at the comment, and so he repeated it several times over. I wanted to adopt him. He clearly fit right in with us.

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

Soul Sunday

Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. Poems have no rules, other than to feel the words as you write them. Write yourself a poem today. It may be a beautiful present to give to yourself, during this season of giving. Here is my poem that I wrote just now:

The song of the house has been quiet lately.

Soft, rhythmic, even, lulling and serene.

Everyone just came home for the holidays.

The song of the house has been changed.

Loud, disruptive, uneven, jarring and exciting.

These songs are the soundtrack of my life.

I love how it all comes together to be,

the most beautiful music I have ever heard,

the most beautiful music that I dance to,

the loveliest background rhythms of life being lived.

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

Automation

Last night, our middle son showed us something on the internet called “ChatGPT”. It’s an artificial intelligence that appears to make Siri seem like an inexperienced child and apparently, ChatGPT is only in its own infant/rudimentary stages. To show us an example, our son asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a lonely turtle. In less than a minute or two, the ChatGPT wrote a four stanza poem that rhymed perfectly and was quite clever and added a lot of details about a forlorn little turtle. Our own kids, who are still college students, admitted that some kids use this tool occasionally to write their required essays. I like to believe that those “some kids” are not mine.

As a writer, I find this new technology heartbreaking. I’ve often curiously questioned technological advances in the past, and their moral implications, but this is the first time something that I am fully passionate about, is being touched by and taken over by automation. Will the kind of writing that I like to do, become some quaint relic from the past? Will we grow to assume that everything that we read in newspapers, magazines, on the internet, and even in books has been written by some algorithm/artificial intelligence? Will anything be original and human anymore, or will everything that we do be handled and created by robots?

My son reminded me that artificial intelligence only works with what we “feed” into it. He said that he could ask ChatGPT to write a poem about a lonely turtle with more of a Shakespearean feel to it, and he reminded me that AI could only do that because Shakespeare existed first.

I fear sometimes our need for perfection. I fear that we worship at the holy grail of getting everything done quickly, easily, and flawlessly. We disdain the imperfections which we find on our faces, so we have filters for that. A machine can do surgeries precisely. Who needs a human touch? Are those science fiction shows about babies being birthed into labs in order to mine them for replacement organs going to really come to fruition?

Sometimes when I write, I think to myself, why do I do this? Everything that I write about has already been written about, by other people, at least 100 times over. But then I remember reading an article by Anna Quindlen, a great writer and teacher, who told her students that we all can write about the same thing, but nobody brings the same “voice or soul” to any one topic. Like fingerprints, each writer has their own intrinsic voice. I believe that this individual voice from each creator/artist/writer is connected to our deepest souls, and that’s something that machines don’t have – they don’t have feelings or passion or a true connection to Creative Intelligence, which is the true source to all things alive and wonderful. Machines don’t have souls. In my mind, Creative Intelligence dwarfs Artificial Intelligence any day. The most beautiful creations in the world, whether they be natural, or manmade, are beautiful because they were created out of passion and longing and feeling and desire. Feelings are messy. They are not perfect. Feelings are jarring, and fleeting, and overpowering, and intense. Feelings are not analytical and systematic and perfect and predictable. Feelings are human. Feelings come from our souls. The best creations in the world come from harnessing the chaos of the fervor and the zeal of our feelings and of our intuitions and of our passions. Intelligence without feeling is aptly named “artificial.” Creative intelligence is as real as it gets. We humans are the channels for Creative Intelligence. I hope and pray that this never changes.

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

Stretch Out Friday

Hi readers and friends. We have a lot going on in our family right now. After a long, protracted, difficult decline, my mother-in-law passed on yesterday. That’s our sad, bad, terrible news. Our happy news is that today is my birthday, and I am receiving the best birthday present that I could possibly ask for at this time. Our youngest son is graduating from college today, a semester early. My longtime friends and readers know that we went through pure hell in the fall of 2021, as our son’s epileptic seizures were not being controlled by medication. He was suffering at least one major seizure a week, for several weeks in a row. We spent a lot of time in hospitals, and we had a lot of teary, distraught conversations about what to do next. Our youngest son talked about dropping out of college more than once. But, he persisted. We persisted. His wonderful doctor persisted. And we found a combination of three medications which have kept our son seizure-free for over a year now. (Do you remember that part yesterday when I wrote about the clouds always, always passing? . . . . they do. They do. The clouds ALWAYS pass.) And today, our youngest son becomes a college graduate! And I am so utterly grateful for this turn of events. God/Life/Universe: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Family/Friends/Readers, for your kindness and support and prayers and love: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Please bear with me these next few weeks. Writing is therapeutic for me, and I fully expect to continue to write my daily blog. I’ve written on the daily for years now, in my normal times, and in my not so normal times. I have written this daily blog from different states, and even being in different countries. I have definitely written this blog in so, so many, many different states of mind (which you probably can tell). The bottom line is, I love to write, and I love the connection that I have with all of you, my beloved readers. And I am a big one for consistency, reliability, dependability, devotion etc. Still, I’ve got a lot going on. Things are pretty bittersweet here with my family. I may not be as consistent or as “level” as I would like to be in the next few weeks going forward, so please just bear with me. I always bounce back. And I need you.

Okay, I know. This is a lot for a Friday post. I have readers who tell me that they only check in on the blog on Fridays, to read about my “favorite stuff.” They don’t want to go all deep and philosophical and that’s okay by me. Believe me, I get it. I love my stuff. Stuff is the stuff of life. Today, I will still share a favorite with you. My favorite for today is a chain called StretchLab and I adore this place. It’s like doing yoga that’s carefully assisted. It’s like a combination of yoga and a massage. You don’t have to get undressed, and you feel so damn good throughout the whole experience. (Come on baby, make it hurt so good!) If you have sore spots on your body (who doesn’t?), this is the place for you to go to experience some real relief and to get reacquainted with your physical body.

Okay, all. I love you. Happy Friday! Happy Birthday to me! I hope to “see” you tomorrow.

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

D-Words

The mind craves information, which is interesting. The soul craves inspiration, which is crucial.
~ Alan Cohen

I don’t plan on tying in the quote above to my writing today. I just happened to read the Alan Cohen quote this morning and I thought that it was so spot on, I had to share it. I look at my blog as a museum or a treasure chest of thoughts and ideas that I can come back to any time that I want to, or need to, and I hope that you see it as the same thing ~ a repository of ideas.

In other news, a few minutes ago, I got into a war of wills with our Boykin spaniel, Trip. I felt his soft fur at my feet as I was writing, and I heard the rustling in the garbage can, but by the time that I put 2+2 together (I’m slow in the morning time), Trip had disappeared with paper in his mouth. Trip and our collie, Josie are paper hounds. They love to chew paper. And then inevitably they end up throwing up said paper, somewhere around the house, hours later, usually in more than one “crime scene”. So, I frantically started yelling to Trip, “Leave it. Drop it!”

And in his mind, I think that he was saying to me, “Ha! Dream it.”

And then things got even better for Trip because I got easily baited into a game of chase, running around the couch (which by the way, they say is an excellent thing to do if you are ever being chased by an assailant. It is much harder to catch anyone when they are running around something, such as a parked car, than just running away.) And I know this tip. And I understand why it would be true. And yet, I still got baited into hopelessly chasing Trip around the couch, yelling, while our other dogs bounced and barked at all of the exciting revelry.

Now, two of our adult children are already home for the holidays, and I didn’t want to wake them, and I still didn’t want to clean up dog vomit later, so I knew that I had come up with another plan. As it is said, “What is the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing, again and again, and expecting different results.”

So, I went to the savory dog treat jar and I cleverly called to my pack, “Anyone want a treat?” Ralphie, the ever-hungry, always on a diet, labrador was already there, sitting with his mouth watering, and Josie was close behind. Trip stood in the entrance of the kitchen, paper in mouth, obviously carefully considering the situation. Reluctantly, he dropped the paper in his mouth. Treats inevitably taste better than wood pulp. (although probably not much better, although I have never tried them.)

Now, some would say that you should never reward a dog for being a d^%&**& (you fill in the blanks, there are a lot of words that start with the letter “D” that could work here, if you use your imagination). Trip did not listen to my command, why should he be rewarded? I think that the real treat was that I craftily outsmarted the little fellow. (Yes, I wrote that line with a smug, self-impressed expression on my face.)

And yet, if I am honest with myself, Trippy might be getting the last laugh here. I have written an entire blog post about him. And he upgraded from paper to dog treat, all the while misbehaving and causing a ruckus. (Yes, as I write this line, I peer down at my little brown spaniel at my feet, and he has quite the smug, self-impressed expression on his own cute, little face. D^&%$&!)

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

Whoa

I always tend to get a little frustrated at this time of year. This time of year is also around my birthday, and so my juices really get flowing, thinking about what I want in the new year. I get excited about the little tweaks that I want to make in myself and in my habits, and I get electrified about the adventures that I want to plan, and to go on. I get revved up like a racehorse, chomping at the bit, in a starting gate. I want to “Go!” And sometimes the holidays feel like an annoying distraction. Sometimes the holidays feel like this inching along, tedious, busy work detour to go through, before I get to the place where the starting gate is able to be open once again. And as I write this, I realize that this is a terrible attitude.

You have to get to the finish line before you start the next race. And you have to take a slower paced victory lap, in order to build your stamina, and to catch your breath before you are ready to start a new race. You have to process what you did right in your last run, and where there is room for improvement. You must take the time to rest, and to celebrate your growth and the experience which you gained, and to integrate these aspects of wisdom into yourself, before you start galloping off again. A deliberate slowdown is important, and this celebratory, introspective time is not meant to be rushed through. The holidays are the time to cool off, to stand still, and revel in the adornment of the “Garland of Roses”, celebrating another year lived in your own precious life. To run races, one right after another, again and again, is just not sustainable. So, in short, whoa Nelly! (Or in my case, whoa Kelly!) The new race is right around the corner. Take a breath. Rest, reflection, and revelry is every bit as important as racing onward.

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

Monday – Funday

Our eldest son came home for the holidays yesterday. If our son didn’t realize how excited his mom and dad were for him to be here, our dogs made sure to show him. To be as uninhibited as a happy dog, should be on all of our holiday wish lists this year.

Speaking of dogs, I had sort of a mystical experience this weekend, when I opened up a box of a Christmas wreath which we never put up, but we keep in our attic year after year. In the box, was only the wreath and a small, white satin pouch. I opened the pouch and I found an ornament with a picture of Lacey, my first collie and the dog who transformed me and loved me like no other dog in my life. I do not recall ever buying, or seeing this ornament. It touched my heart deeply and I felt connected to the spirit of Lacey and all the love she gave to me and our family. This ornament will be the centerpiece of this year’s tree.

I wrote about Lacey, years ago, here:

Lacey – Love

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