Tag: life

The Childish Stage

The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning

When I was away last week, I didn’t look at the news. I didn’t scroll through Twitter. I eased into my mornings. I savored delicious food and I reveled in long, meandering conversations. I didn’t look at my phone immediately and at all times. (This is partly because I recently read an article which was an interview with Good Morning America anchor, Robin Roberts. Robin said that someone recently told her that if you look at your phone first thing in the morning, that’s like inviting 100 screaming people into your bedroom. That resonated with me. I like my bedroom to be my quiet, peaceful place.)

Being childlike isn’t just about being silly and playful and goofy and blunt. Being childlike is mostly about paying attention to the immediate. Being childlike is following your whims and what is capturing your fascination, mostly because it is just so interesting and captivating to do so. Being childlike is being enthralled with the process of being alive.

I think the second-half of adulthood is when you really hone in on what actually matters to you. You wake up to the realization that you are on the downward slope of the mountainside of your own life. And the climb that you trudged on the upward slope of your early adulthood is sort of a blur. You don’t remember a lot of the upward climb. You were so busy running up the track and following the signs that were dictated as directions for you, and for everyone else, to follow and to follow quickly, as if on a race. On this downward trek, in your second half of adulting, you aren’t convinced that you need all of the baggage that you climbed up with, and collected along the way. A lot of this baggage isn’t even your own. So on the downward slope, you drop a lot of stuff that you realize isn’t necessary for you to carry, and you take frequent stops along the way to just notice and take in everything. Everything. You meander off of the beaten path more, because life can be really interesting off of the beaten path. And you make no apologies for it. You become like a child again and you remember what those first wondrous steps and breaths of life really must of felt like, and you realize how amazing and wonderful and awe-striking this second half of adulting will be. Learning to be a child is wonderful.

“Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” – Luke 18:17

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

Monday Fun-Day

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(credit: Rex Masters, Twitter)

I think one of the biggest lessons in aging is coming to terms with how little we actually know about anything. The so-called “experts” change their minds about everything all of the time. And we all have a really hard time keeping our “slants” whether they be political, personal, spiritual, etc., out of anything. As one ages, you gain a lot of insight and experience into how little we really know about anything. When you can finally relax into the acceptance of this fact, it makes it far easier to savor the mystery and intrigue of it all.

TOP 25 MYSTERY OF LIFE QUOTES (of 112) | A-Z Quotes

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

Landscapes

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post credited to Think Smarter, Twitter, writer unknown

I love this post. Who makes up the landscapes of your life? Who’s your delicate flower? Your raging ocean? Your quiet forest? Your towering mountain? Your colorful sky? Who has knocked you down and left you breathless? Who brings sunshine into your life? What if you listed all of these different people right now, and then listed the lesson that each of them has taught to you in your own life. Wouldn’t this be an insightful exercise? Wouldn’t you be amazed at the blessings different people have been, and can be, in order to help you to find your own true north, your own true self?

On the opposite side of the coin, imagine what force of nature you might be in other people’s lives. Are you that same force of nature for everyone whom you meet? I’ve known sweet, cuddly panda-types who are able to turn on a dime into raging Kodiak mama bears, if their children are being threatened. And I adore them for that transformative power.

It’s interesting, too, when all of these people come together as a family, or as close groups of friends or co-workers. You almost get a whole new experience and lessons when this happens. Your family and your people who make up the different landscapes of your life, create unique worlds for you and each bring out different aspects of yourself. What group of people make up your rocky terrain? Who’s your smooth sailing team? Where do you fit into these different landscapes? How do you feel in these different elements? How do these different terrains morph you into different forms?

During the holidays, it is so easy to stay distracted and busy and bustled and frazzled. Don’t forget to take a pause and give yourself the precious present of your own presence. The holidays happen at the end of one year, and on the cusp of a new year. There is no better time than now, to spend some quiet time in meditation and in contemplation. Turn the twinkly lights down. Put the to-do list into a closed folder for a moment, and take some time to breathe and to relish and to cherish and to mourn and to feel and to cry and to laugh and to hope and to pray and to smile and to believe and to listen and to hear and to smell and to taste and to savor and to see and to really see and to swell and to relax. Notice what happens when you do these things. Notice what happens in your body. Notice what happens in your mind. Notice what happens in your spirit. Be curious about you. Take some time to be human. Take some time to just be. Realize your own presence, your own energy, your own scenery and delight in it, and all of its amazing abilities. Realize everything that you bring to yourself, and to all of the different people in your life. Realize your part in every landscape of your life and be in awe. You are amazing. You are a vital part of it all.

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

Happy, Peaceful People

credit: wise connector, Twitter

These are the hard truths which we don’t always like to accept: We decide to feel happy or not, and no one can make us feel happy, nor can we make anyone else feel happy. Happiness is an inside job. We can all name people we know, who based on their great luck and fortune, and high income, and their families and their “things”, and their health, and their opportunities etc. , should be among the happiest people on the face of the Earth and yet, these people are instead, utterly miserable. And then we all have met people who have experienced some of the most tragic of circumstances imaginable, who still have the brightest, shiniest smiles on their faces, and we wonder, how can this possibly be?

This is not to say that we must deny or suppress our other feelings. It is not healthy nor is it realistic, to not feel the wide spectrum of human emotions. We were designed to feel our feelings, and to use them as a compass, and as a way to guide and to heal ourselves, throughout our lives. You can still be a happy, peaceful person and feel great sadness about a loss. Happy people still shed tears. You can still be a happy, peaceful person and process your anger about an unfair situation. Happy people learn to be assertive when their boundaries are trampled upon, which is noticed when we feel the burning alert of righteous anger. You can still be a happy, peaceful person and feel the worrisome rush of fear when encountering a circumstance in life, in which you have very little control. Happy people know that fear can be helpful to remind us to move with caution, but also happy people know that fear can be overcome. In fact, to truly be a happy, peaceful person, you must allow yourself to feel all of your feelings without judgment. Feelings just are. Happy, peaceful people know this. They don’t allow any of their feelings to stay stuck inside of them. Happy, peaceful people observe the thoughts and the stories which they are telling themselves, which are helping to create these feelings, and they make course corrections, as necessary. Happy, peaceful people feel their feelings, and then they let them go. Happy peaceful people stay in their core. They stay in a pleasant state of presence and awareness, just observing and experiencing life and emotion, as it happens and unfolds.

Years ago, I worked for a woman who owned an insurance business. During this time, her brother whom she was very close to, died of throat cancer. She became depressed after he died and she would call me every single day, for many weeks, to say that she wouldn’t be coming in to the office that day. My employer told me that she sat on the same spot of her couch for hours at a time, day after day, to the point that the pillow of her couch became permanently indented. Then, one day, out of seemingly nowhere, she bustled into the office, her usual energetic, optimistic self, full of new ideas and directions in which she wanted to take her career. When I looked astonished to see her almost miraculous recovery, I remember her saying to me, that it was quite simple. She was sick of feeling sad.

Happy, peaceful people are typically full of acceptance. They accept reality as it is, not how they would like it to be. They accept the people in their lives, as they are, not how they would want them to be. They create healthy boundaries, in their relationships and in their circumstances, because they deeply value themselves, and the one life in which they have any bit of control over, their own life. I read something recently that made sense to me. You don’t need to care for other people, in order to care about them. In fact, other than in emergencies, most adults should be perfectly capable to care for themselves. It is disrespectful to not allow other adults, to have their own autonomy. Happy, peaceful people respect themselves, and they respect others. Happy, peaceful people trust Life.

Amazon.com: It's sad when you can't make everyone happy... - Stephenie Meyer quotes fridge magnet, Black: Home & Kitchen

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

Favorite Things Friday

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Good morning, friends and readers. Welcome to the best day of the week!! My regular readers know that I typically keep it light and fun on Fridays. On Fridays, I list three favorite things, or songs, or websites or books, or life hacks that make my life more interesting and engaging. You, my readers, really like Fridays, at the blog. Interestingly, usually the most popular days on the blog are on Fridays, and on Sundays (the day that I devote to poetry. You never knew that one of your favorite things is poetry, did you? I caught you. ;)) So this tells me that you, my readers, are my favorite kind of people, a delicious mix of fun and frivolous, yet deep and soulful. It’s good to be well-rounded. Bravo!

As many of you know, we suffered another setback with my son’s epilepsy, this week. His new medications aren’t working out, which is deeply disappointing because the side effects of these medications were much more tolerable, than his last medications. We coaxed our baby to come home for the weekend, so I had the best sleep of my week last night, knowing that he was home safe with me, in my safely feathered nest. (I love sleep. It’s definitely one of my favorites.) My youngest son (the son with epilepsy) is obviously one of my favorite people in the world, and it is not just because he is my son. It is also because my son is funny, and smart, and ethical – almost to a fault; he is insightfully (and sometimes brutally) truthful – like no other person I have ever met, and so, so resilient. I admire him greatly. I love him beyond reason.

I’m drained, friends. These setbacks with epilepsy are hard on our family. These disappointments bring all of our fears and uncertainties, back up to the surface. People who live with serious disorders, know better than anyone, just how fragile life is, and how quickly it can be taken. After experiencing a major health setback, and once you calm down from the anxiety, and you let your shoulders drop, you can sometimes find the gift that comes from these painful realities of living with a disease, or a disability that can take your life, at any moment. It brings clarity and beauty and gratefulness for every simple moment of living a life. I can’t tell you how much my heart sang last night, to listen to my husband and my son yell, in unison, at the football game last night, as they have done so many times in the past. I savored that sound like it came from Heaven above. Because it did. Heaven is all around us, if we open up our eyes and connect our watchful eyes to our hearts.

I’m sorry to get so deep on a Friday. You readers don’t like that, I know. You might be thinking, “Lighten up, lady!”, but it’s my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to . . . .

Please always remember that when you are considering your favorite things in life, it’s never really “the thing”. It’s always the feeling that you get from “the thing.” If you think of one of your favorite things, or people, or places right now, you will get those wonderful feelings that those things give to you, seeping into your consciousness right away. Try it. Do it often. Your favorites are really your favorite feelings, and you are capable of dosing yourself with your favorite feelings regularly. They are just a thought away. Stay aware. That’s the only way to live.

Happy weekend, my favorite readers of my favorite blog! See you tomorrow.

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

The Long Hike

I’ve decided that hiking brings the best out of people. Hikers are incredibly kind to one another. They always make way for people to pass through narrow pathways. They happily take pictures for other hikers. People come from all over the country, actually, people come from all over the world, to hike certain awe-inspiring trails, and the experience is always one of unified peace and pleasure, taking in the pure natural beauty of untouched nature.

Hikers never cut each other off, or jockey for positions on the resting rocks. The overall, unifying sense is one of unity, kindness, excitement, and care. There are all ages of people on hiking trails. I have seen babies in contraptions that didn’t exist when my kids were babies. The baby hikers are in containers that look like little Coleman tents strapped to their father’s or mother’s backs, and they all contain babbling or sleeping, precious, happy babies. Some people run the trails and some meander very slowly, their walking sticks poking at all the beautiful wildflowers and exposing what might be hidden underneath the blooms. Some hikers stop to take pictures at every bend, others hurry along, eager to make it to the highly anticipated destination in record time. And it is all okay. There is no one right way to hike a trail. The only thing every hiker seems to have in common, is an intellectual curiosity and an overwhelming joy to be beholding such unbelievable, marvelous sights. And then to look over at their fellow hikers and see that same joyous, anstonished awe-struck expression on their faces, reflecting their own feelings back to them.

I wish that we could live our lives like we were on an amazing, long, fascinating, sometimes harrowing, surprising, but always worthy adventure. If we hiked our lives with the same respect for other hikers, the same gratefulness for our natural world, and a genuine joy for the experience that one experiences when hiking one of many, many trails, life would be simple, but also grand.

And This is Eternity

I am at one of those particularly poignant, bittersweet times in parenthood. It is one of those times that almost every moment feels like an ending and a new beginning. My eldest son is now completely and totally independent of us, starting his new adult life, in his new state. My second son is almost halfway done with college. My youngest son starts college in the fall. My daughter just completed her first year of high school and is ready to practice driving.

The first couple of years of a child’s life feels like this – the feeling of constant endings and new beginnings. There are so many milestones that happen almost on a daily basis, it makes your head spin . . . and your heart overflow. Then there is this long period of late elementary/middle school years, where, as much as the changes are still happening in your family, they are not nearly as obvious and confronting, as times like these.

As we were driving home from my daughter’s high school tennis tournament yesterday, she and I were reflecting on her first year of high school and how well it went for her, despite the normal fears and hesitations that she felt at the beginning of the year. We laughed at how worried she was about making the tennis team and how now, it feels like “old hat”. High school, in itself, will be more of an “old hat” for her in the next three years before she departs for journeys further away from home.

My parenting style is doing a major shift right now, too. It is much more “hands off”, freeing of the reigns. I am much more of a sideline advocate and “wise” counsel (when sought) these days. I suppose my job is to worry less about their lives and to put the focus more on my own life now, so that they can worry less about me.

This passage is from a beautiful, enchanting old book by Gwen Frostic. The book, A Walk With Me, is printed by block carvings and it is as lovely to look at, as it is to read. Here it is:

The squirrels jump from limb to limb high in the trees that are ever the same . . . and . . . never the same . . . for each day . . . each hour . . . . all things change. . . . . .the trees . . . the flowers . . . rocks . . . .the sand and the waters . . . the birds and all the animals of earth . . . .

. . . .yet – life goes on unchanged . . . . . . . nothing is new

. . . . . . . nothing is old

this is life . . . . . . . .

and this is eternity . . . . . .