Is there anything more precious than your happiest memories? Don’t take the bad memories out. Leave them in the dusty corners of your mind. Open the treasure box that exists in your mind (and always will, no matter what) and think of your favorite memories. Imagine the scene. What was the weather like? Who was there? What were the sights, smells, tastes? Most importantly, what were you feeling? Feel those feels now as you run your happy memories through the reels, again and again. What does it take to make new happy memories? Your treasure box in your mind will always expand to hold these lovely memories. Make the memories. Let them happen. As I always tell my kids, Let Life love you. Go with the flow.
“Memory is the diary we all carry with us.” – Oscar Wilde
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:
We experienced an absolutely gorgeous full moon last night, didn’t we? It’s the last full moon of 2022. It is said that full moons are an excellent time to let go of things that no longer serve your greater good. What needs to be let go for you at this time? What are you hanging on to that needs to be released for your well-being? What can you release to lighten the load as you travel into 2023?
Lately, I’ve been doing daily guided meditations by Chani Nicholas and I love the wording that she chooses to use. When doing a body scan meditation she asks, “Where on your body do you feel a “grip?” Where is the “grip”?” She says to get “curious” about yourself (not judgmental, just interested). Why might you be feeling a “grip” in a certain part of your body? What can you let go that might soften that “grip” – that “grip” that has a hold of you?
“Channel the energy. Don’t let the energy channel you.” – @bigempressenergy
“I feel like the moon is a very beautiful woman. She’s in control.”—Ravyn Lenae
“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”—George Carlin
“Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other.”—Sojourner Truth
“Be both soft and wild. Just like the moon. Or the storm. Or the sea.” —Victoria Erickson
“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon who could not be happy?”—Oscar Wilde
“Don’t worry if you’re making waves just by being yourself. The moon does it all the time.”—Scott Stabile
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Hi friends and readers!! I’m ready for Friday. How about you? New readers, Fridays are dedicated to favorites here at Adulting – SecondHalf. Sometimes my favorites are songs or things or beauty products or food or whatever. I strongly encourage you to check out previous Friday postings for more favorites and please, please add your own favorites to the Comments section. Speaking of favorites, here’s a kindly reminder: McDonald’s Shamrock Shakes are back. They also have a Shamrock McFlurry this year. I can personally attest to the fact that both are delicious, as ever. No particular “things” are sticking out to me as favorites this week, so I’m just going to list some good words of wisdom, I pulled from my internet browsing and reading, this week:
“Difficult roads lead to beautiful places.” – f of f (Twitter)
“It’s okay if you don’t like me, cause not everyone has good taste.” – f of f (Twitter)
“You don’t have to change your life overnight, but try to add good things to each day.” – f of f (Twitter)
“Throw me to the wolves and I will return leading the pack.” – Tiffanie Seiler
“When you put someone on a pedestal, they will always look down on you.” – unknown
Effect – bring about a result. Affect – to make a difference. (good grammar tip)
“You can’t bring up my past to break me, that’s what made me.” – f of f (Twitter)
“Keep in mind that you don’t have to feel brave to do brave things. Brave is more of an action than a feeling anyway.” – Holiday Mathis
“You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.” – f of f (Twitter)
“True friends stab you in the front.” – Oscar Wilde
“Give a man a mask and he will show you his true face.” – Oscar Wilde (think internet trolls)
“I love this crazy, tragic, sometimes almost magic, awful, beautiful life.” – Darryl Worley
“Romantic love is a kind of spell. As anyone who has ever read a fairytale knows, spells have a way of being broken. That’s why it helps when you have many different kinds of love for the same person. The loyal love you feel for country and family; the compassion you feel for the young, old, or weak; the playful, competitive love that siblings and friends share_ if all these kinds of love are woven together in the same relationship, it can withstand the precarious ups and downs of romantic love and even out some of that drama.” – Holiday Mathis
“Life is the most difficult exam. Many people fail because they try to copy others, not realizing that everyone has a different question paper. ” – Smart Thinking, Twitter
I thought that this was an apropos quote for this time of year, with so many high schoolers and college kids taking their final exams and AP exams. And of course, the Met Gala just happened. No one tries to copy each other at the Met Gala. They totally try to out-do each other, and especially, to out-do their own previous Met Gala red carpet entrances.
Wouldn’t life be so much more interesting if we lived Met Gala lives, versus copy cat lives? When I look around these days, it sometimes feels like we are headed in that direction of unique, enthralling and strange, but in a good way. Instead of being threatened by it, I think that I am going to embrace it. I’m going to think outside of the box, a little bit more.
I’ve mentioned before that I love to check out Nature’s Lovers on Twitter. Today there was a beautiful picture posted of a Eurasian Lynx. I found out that there are actually four different varieties of lynx and 40 different known species of big cats in the world. The Borneo Clouded Leopard is not trying to be a Fishing Cat and the Caracal is not trying to be a Margay. (there, I gave you some interesting things to Google on this fine Tuesday)
I suppose that this post is just serving as a reminder to all of us to “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” – Oscar Wilde
Last night, my husband and I rented a movie from Redbox called BadTimes at the El Royale. It was a noir/mystery type movie that kept you guessing throughout its entirety. I spilled my drink and my snack more than once from jumping out of my skin because the totally unexpected, happened, out of nowhere, more than a dozen times in the movie. It struck me that most of us love the thrill of being surprised in our entertainment, but not so much in our regular lives. We like to live with stability and predictability, but the vicarious thrills of someone else going through something unanticipated, keeps our hearts pumping. Decades ago, I sold college textbooks. We had a hard-nosed, old school district manager who loved to say, “I can handle anything but surprises. Don’t ever let me be surprised.”
“No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.” – Julius Caesar
Oscar Wilde is most notably credited with our “expect the unexpected” adage. We think that we dread unplanned surprises, but there is a certain daring, and enthrallment that comes from being surprised or even surprising ourselves with our own unexpected actions, reactions and creations. Unknowns are not always threatening, hence the term, “happy surprises.” I think that there will always be a large part of our humanity that will always crave stability, but also the sneaky, little, devilish, slightly hidden part of our humanity that just can’t wait for the bombshell to pop out of left field. The mix of both of these elements, is what makes life so sustainable, yet so interesting.
“The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.” – W. H. Auden
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist. That is all.” – Oscar Wilde
I read this quote the other day and it made me feel quite sad. I hope Oscar has it wrong. I remember being in my first real professional job out of college and a female manager told me, “The role of the woman in the 1990s is to cope, just cope.”
Everything in my body recoiled at that statement. I remember thinking, “No way. I’m not going to “just cope.” There’s a hell of a lot more to life than coping. I plan to thrive.”
Now, there have been dark times in my life when I have been brought to my knees and it took every breath in my body, to just cope or exist in that moment. I imagine that there are those moments for everybody. But those are just moments. Those moments pass because there is something stronger and deeper in each of us that innately understands that existing is not enough. Life is meant to be fully explored, exploited and turned inside out until every morsel of being-ness has been not just tasted, but devoured and digested until we are satiated with the full feeling of satisfaction, gratification and joy. It is our responsibility to realize this. We have a choice. We can just exist. According to Oscar Wilde and my old boss, that’s what most of us do. But we have all of the tools inside of us to thrive and radiate and prosper and flourish, if we choose to open the floodgates of life, teeming inside of us, aching to expand.
“Life is amazing; live it to the fullest. Stay as long as you can.” – Valerie Harper
