I am having one of those weekends that feels like a delicious, warm, comforting reward for a week of getting things off of my plate that have been nibbling at me. It’s so satisfying to look at my to-do list with lines all through it and to tell myself, “Okay, Lady, good job. Now, just go have some fun!”
Book I’m Currently Reading: The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest. I highly recommend this book. I’m halfway through it, and it is filled with interesting scientific facts about how our human minds work. I am finding this book to be interesting, helpful and in many ways enlightening.
Song I’m Currently Listening To: Bam Bam by Sister Nancy. This is such a great reggae classic. My daughter reminded me of it when she played it yesterday when we were driving in her car. I love that my kids bring back the cool stuff from ‘my day’ and make me love and appreciate these things all over again. I have reached an age that I am now so “retro”, that I’m actually kind of cool again. Bam Bam, baby!
Best Compliment I Received This Week: “I’m a really hard person to buy for and you completely nailed it.” It is such a satisfying feeling to give a gift, and to see that the person receiving the gift absolutely adores what you gave to them. We all love to receive gifts and we all appreciate the thought and the kindness and the resources and time that go into thinking about, buying, creating, packaging and sending gifts, but the total cherry on the top is when the the gift is exactly what a person loves and you, as the giver, get to be the simultaneous messenger/receiver of that love, and joy, and connection of the event of “just the right gift”.
Okay, friends. Please answer the above prompts just for yourself, or if you choose, in my Comments section. What’s happening for you right now? What’s feeling good this weekend for you? What’s your “vibe”?
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Happy Friday, friends!! Happy Best Day of the Week!! Our daughter is coming home for the weekend from college, so needless to say this is a great Friday for us! (but aren’t all Fridays wonderful?!) My regular readers know that I dedicate Fridays on the blog, to the materially fun and frivolous. On Fridays, I discuss stuff that I like. That’s it. Nothing deeper than stuff and fluff that I like. Please check out previous Friday posts for more favorites and please share your favorites in my Comments section. I’m always looking to add to my list of favorites in my life!
Today’s favorite I picked up the other day because I love all things related to stationery. (And I love all things related to dogs.) Of course I didn’t need another pad of paper, but this one makes me particularly happy. Today’s favorite is Eccolo World Traveler Dog Lover’s Pad. What makes this pad of paper particularly special is that each piece of paper features a different dog. There is not one duplicate of the same dog! We dog lovers know that each dog, even if they are of the same breed, are as utterly unique as individual snowflakes and fingerprints. If you are a dog lover (and most of us are, it seems) you will find this pad for jotting down notes and lists, a must-have! You can purchase Eccolo World Traveler Dog Lover’s Pad at Staples like I did, or you can order it from Amazon.
I hope that your tails wag all weekend, and that you have new exciting tales to tell of what you explored and experienced! See you tomorrow.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
My sister used to say that everything has an expiration date. We were actually talking about hair stylists at the time. My current hair stylist is wonderful. I have been going to her for several years now, and unless she retires, I don’t see an expiration date in sight for using her services. But I have had several hair stylists throughout the years and at the time of having that conversation, I was feeling guilty about wanting to try a new one.
I was reminded of this conversation because recently my middle son was lamenting about feeling uneasy about a friendship that he is no longer interested in pursuing. He has had this friend since they were children, but they are going on two completely different paths in life, and they have very little in common anymore. The glue that keeps them together is little more than “guilt” these days, and perhaps a little bit of a sad nostalgia for “what was”.
I’ve had meaningful relationship experiences with people I was only with for a day – a nurse who held me and soothed me when I was crying about my miscarriage, an almost all night long, deep, meaningful conversation with other teenagers whom I had met on a summer vacation across the country, and a cancer patient whom I met on a long flight. She and I ended up sharing a pleasant lunch together at an airport. I have never forgotten any of these people. Obviously. I am writing about them now.
How long a relationship lasts does not indicate how profound or meaningful it is to your life. Healthy relationships are built on mutual connection and affection. Unhealthy relationships are based on fear, obligation and guilt. What was once a mutually healthy, growing relationship, can become unstable, and stale, and even toxic. Everyone and everything on this earth is involved in a constant process of change. Sometimes these evolutions bring you closer to others, and sometimes these transformations show that the time has come to go our separate ways.
Sometimes it’s necessary to love people from afar, and from a distance. Sometimes it’s comforting to reflect on all of the connections that you have made in your own lifetime, and to remember these relationships and experiences fondly and gratefully for the growth that they have created in you. It is sort of like gazing at the same stars, in the same sky. We all have stars of connection that we have shared with others throughout our lifetime, and the light from the stars of those same shared connections, continue to shine brightly, in our hearts, in the form of gratefulness and of fond memories. By the end of our lifetimes, we will have created a star-filled sky of connections for ourselves, and at the same time, we know that we are a shiny, brilliant part (no matter how distant) of many others’ star-filled skies of lifetime connections, relationships, and bonds. No relationship is ever truly over if it is always remembered. We just have to look up at the starry skies at night to understand this pure truth.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I spent some time over the weekend reading my Spirituality and Health magazine and I learned a couple of new words that I really like. The first word is a Finnish word called sisu. The word was invented in 1939, at a time when tiny Finland was able to hold off an invasion by the Soviets during a particularly frigid winter. Sisu means the ability to push your limits (mentally, physically and spiritually) further than you ever knew possible. It stands for pure grit, and by the time we reach middle age, all of us can look back on at least one or two “Incredible Hulk” moments in our lives, when our sisu kicked in. It is a good reminder to ourselves to remember deep within all of us lies the treasure of our indomitable sisu.
The second word is freudenfreude which means taking vicarious delight in someone else’s good fortune. Most of us have heard of (and maybe even felt some shame for feeling) schadenfreude which means feeling some joy for someone else’s misfortune. I think that it’s sad that freudenfreude isn’t as commonly known a word as schadenfreude. I know that freudenfreude is frequently felt. I didn’t care who won the Super Bowl this year, but I was gleeful for the thrilled players and fans of Kansas City. I can’t help but feel freudenfreude whenever I see a delighted child, or a dog whose tail is going one hundred miles a minute. Perhaps the rest of this week, we should make it a point of feeling freudenfreude whenever we can. We should seek freudenfreude out. In my experience, I feel the greatest freudenfreude for underdogs who have gone all out with their sisu, and end up being victorious. That’s the best freudenfreude of all!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I’ve been noticing a phenomenon in myself and others a lot lately. We make a decision or we place a boundary, but then we explain our decision ad nauseum, to anyone who is listening range. We extol on why our decision was “right” or necessary, but by doing that, it seems to take away from the confidence of our decision/boundary. Sometimes we harangue so much about our situation, that it makes me wonder if we would be better off never making the decision or boundary to begin with, because the situation is obviously still eating us up, and taking up a lot of our time, peace, and mindspace.
When I was younger I was better about making a decision and putting the rest of it in the rearview mirror. I had confidence in myself that no matter what I decided, I would be able to handle the outcome, and be better for it. When I was younger, I better understood that there are no “perfect” solutions and most problems can be solved in many different ways. I didn’t need the 100 percent approval rate, that I sometimes think that I am vying for now.
I think that it’s odd that the confidence in my decision making has abated a bit in me. I suppose that youthful optimism, energy, and carefreeness wanes with time and experience. But that’s a shame, because I’m older now and there’s a lot less time to waste. My whole life has been a series of daily decisions that have worked out quite nicely for me. And even when I have gotten off track, I’ve used my decision making skills to get back on the best leg of my journey going forward. It’s best to make a decision and roll with it. If it ends up being a poor decision, more decisions can be made to move forward in a different direction. Lamenting a decision just keeps one stuck in neutral.
“Sometimes you make the right decision, sometimes you make the decision right.”– Phil McGraw
“You cannot make progress without making decisions.”– Jim Rohn
“Life is filled with difficult decisions, and winners are those who make them.”– Dan Brown
“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.”– Anthony Robbins
“Don’t mourn over your bad decisions. Just start overcoming them with good ones.”– Joyce Meyer
“When possible make the decisions now, even if action is in the future. A revised decision usually is better than one reached at the last moment.”– William B. Given
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Good morning. I read an article yesterday about the actress Sally Field. One time, one of her sons was going through a bout of anxiety, when he was constantly worried that she wouldn’t be there to pick him up from school, or she wouldn’t be there at night when he was falling asleep. Sally Field reassured him, “Sammy, I will always be there to pick you up, even when I’m not there.”
I thought to myself, “Isn’t that the truth? My own four grown children are all over the place, living their adult lives, and even though I am not physically there with any of them, I am there. I am always there. As I often say, my children are pieces of my heart walking around on eight legs.”
I hope that you have a wonderful start of the week. My husband is off for the holiday. I have to say that this late, leisurely start is the right way to do a Monday.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
A good friend of mine has been an experiencing an ongoing problem in her life for years now. She texted another episode to our friend group this morning. I recommended that she go through her texts, and to make a timeline of this issue and how many times she has experienced the pain and the hurt from this same situation again and again. It really helps to have this kind of thing put on to paper. When you visually see facts, and dates, and times, all laid out on a timeline, it helps to make sense of what is happening in your life, without emotions, or exaggerating, or romanticizing what has gone on. I have done this many times in my life with different situations. It is a big part of my keeping a daily journal. It keeps me honest and it gives me clarity. It shows me patterns, and the parts that I play in the patterns of my life. If you are having an ongoing issue with a person, or a job, or even yourself and your own behaviors, create a factual timeline of what, who, when, where and how, and see if you can make some sense of it all. See if you want to continue the pattern of your timeline, or if there are changes that you can make to put an endpoint to this one particular timeline/saga of your life. When we study history, we look at timelines all day long. Why do we study history? So we can learn to not repeat past mistakes, and to create better pathways for our future. Assignment for the day: Pick a problem that’s been eating at you, and create a timeline of that situation. Go through your calendars, your journals, your texts, your memory banks, your pictures, your social media . . . whatever tools that you have to help you to create your timeline. Get interested in yourself. Your life itself, is its own timeline. Visually see what this timeline of yours looks like, and make sure that you want to continue in the direction that you see this timeline going in.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
My post yesterday hit quite the nerve. It appears more of you need to turn into dragons and guard the finite, yet infinitely valuable treasure of your time. Only give your time away to those activities and people that/who are inspiring and rewarding to you. Take this weekend to carefully consider if you have been carelessly, thoughtlessly, and perhaps even “self-harmingly” giving away too much of the greatest treasure of your own precious time. No one will be your dragon, but you. Be that dragon and respect other dragons. In the Asian Zodiac, people with the dragon element are “charismatic, intelligent, confident, powerful and they are naturally lucky and gifted.” (credit: depts.washington.edu) Own and cultivate your inner dragon. Deep down, your dragon is within you. Go to your depths to discover your beautiful, ferocious, protective inner dragon.
Happy Friday, my fellow dragons!! Thank you for spending your valuable time here at the blog. I hope that you find it to be time well spent. Writing this blog every morning is one of my all-time favorite ways to spend my time. Every Friday (which is my favorite day of the week), I focus on favorites – usually tactile, material favorites, such as real gold coins. I love gold. I consider gold to be a favorite. However, today’s favorite is liquid gold. It is the best stain remover that I have come across yet. The other day I was wearing a new cream colored shirt that depicts all four of my children’s shared university. I love this shirt, and it was only the second or third time that I had ever worn it. It appears that I splashed spaghetti sauce on it, but I was negligently unaware of that fact, and so I washed the cream colored shirt and I dried it, only to discover the ugly orange sauce spots after pulling the shirt out of the dryer. (I’m taking a pause to breathe some fire here.) However, I soon breathed a sigh of relief, because I knew that I had a bottle of Incredible! stain remover (you can get this on Amazon, of course) in my cabinet. Incredible! lives up to its name and it can be used on so much more than clothing. Buy yourself a bottle of Incredible! in order to house a little bit of peace of mind, in a bottle, in your cabinet.
Have a wonderful weekend spending the most valuable treasure of your own time wisely! See you tomorrow!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
We have had a fair amount of death and dying and serious illnesses in our extended family in the last year or so. There is nothing that makes you reflect on your own life and how you live it, like someone else’s death. Yesterday, I wrote about going through my old daily journals from this past decade. I also went through my prayer box. (When I tell you that I love to write, I’m not lying. I am always looking for excuses to write more stuff down.) Yesterday, I opened up all of the little papers in my prayer box, and I can honestly tell you that already 90 percent of my prayers in my prayer box have been answered, and these answered desires exist in my life today. (Time for me to get crackin’ on some more desires, wishes and prayers.) Gratitude is living the life that you prayed for, and being in awe of the miraculous process of how it all comes into being. Gratitude is taking the pause to say thanks and to feel that thankfulness from your deepest depths.
Another thing that I have been deeply pondering lately is the worth of my time. Recently I got back in touch with a good friend from my past, whom I have always felt an instant kinship to, any time that we meet. The last time that we reconnected with each other was in this past December and I hadn’t seen nor spoken to her in over ten years before then, and yet it was like I had just seen her yesterday. Don’t you just love relationships like these? We both raised our kids in the old-fashioned traditional way, where our husbands were the main breadwinners and we were the family managers, mostly staying at home, with just odd part-time jobs here or there. (She has three kids. I have four.) Earlier this week, I texted her to see if we could connect today on a call, and I asked if she would be available around 11 a.m. She wryly replied that she would pencil me in. I got a kick out of her reaction. (We’ve always laughed together a lot.) Still, it made me realize how much more protective of my own time I’ve become, especially lately as my kids have grown, and they have left the nest.
My morning process of reading and writing and meditating and being alone with my thoughts is extremely valuable to me. I don’t get paid to do it, but it is my vocation. It feels like it is a big part of my purpose in life, and it is a deeply meaningful part of my everyday life. How my morning goes, often has a lot to do with how the rest of my day goes afterwards. So honestly, unless it is urgent or dire, I don’t allow anything to creep into my mornings. I do my best to not have any morning appointments with anybody. I treat MY TIME every bit as importantly as if I were a CEO with a tight schedule. Why should someone’s time only be considered important and uninterruptible if they are getting paid to do whatever fits into that time slot? I am the CEO of my own life, after all.
For years in raising my family, everybody else’s schedule was the priority. If something needed to be dropped, it was usually some activity of mine. And that’s okay. I signed up for the job of family manager and I did what I needed to do to make things run smoothly and effectively, as well as I could. But my family is grown now, and I am prioritizing myself more. Interestingly, I’ve noticed surprised reactions from my friends and my family when I keep my boundaries around scheduling phone calls and visits. I believe that planning ahead for calls shows respect for my time, and also for theirs. Time is everyone’s greatest treasure. If anything death has shown me in this last year, is that our time on Earth is not replenishable. I value my time, and I value your time. Every minute that we give to actions, and to others, is a little chunk of treasure from our own unreplenishable treasure chests, filled with little chunks of our time to live. Shouldn’t we be clear and conscious of who and what we are giving our treasure to, every single day of our lives? When I volunteered for different things throughout the years, I noticed that people were thankful and respectful of my time that I was volunteering to give. I didn’t get paid for that time either, but people didn’t take that time of mine for granted. Maybe that is why so many of us get fulfillment from volunteering. There are little expectations and great appreciation when you are willing to give your time away to a cause.
If we look at every minute of our days as little chunks of gold from the one treasure chest that we get in this lifetime (and mysteriously, none of us know until the very end, how many of these little chunks are actually in our individual treasure chests of time), we get a whole lot more careful about where we give it away. Our time is more valuable than our money, than our possessions, than even our relationships, because without our time, we don’t exist. Spend your time consciously, wisely and gratefully. Treasure your time. It is your most valuable possession.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
