“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.” – Pearl Buck
I hope that everyone enjoyed and is continuing to enjoy a wonderful holiday season. Today is a little “respite” into what has become to be, what I call the Venn diagram of Christmas. We have four adult kids, with their own careers, and who all have serious significant others with careers and their own extended families, so our Christmas is a lot of comings and goings. We still plan to have our biggest celebration, when all of our crew can finally be at the same place at the same time, in a few days. This has been a transition that started happening a few years back and it is still evolving as our youngest is graduating from college in the spring. I’ve learned to embrace it, and to surrender to the gifts and to the surprises and to the metamorphoses that each new Christmas season brings. I have learned to savor the small joys that have a way of turning into “the big happiness.” Our daughter said that someone asked her recently how her parents were doing with all of the big transformations which we have been experiencing in our lives lately and my husband and I looked at each other and smiled. I think we are doing just fine. Change is the only constant and so you have a choice to embrace it and look for the growth and the blessings, or to fruitlessly try to fight it, and end up despondent and frustrated by your own futile resistance. I choose to focus on the joys.
Karen Nimmo wrote an excellent article about the four best questions to answer, in order to reflect on your past year, in order to help you do any course corrections for the new year. My birthday happens to fall in December, so I find this time of year to be particularly reflective for me, and I really enjoyed the structure of her questions. My husband and I answered these questions with two of our kids the other night, and it really gave us insight into what we are all feeling and doing. Here are the questions:
What did you do this year? (when you start listing everything that you did, I think you will be amazed!)
What delighted you? (perhaps bring more of this answer into the new year?)
How did you improve?
What demanded courage?
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.