Tag: self awareness

Good Food for the Soul

Our daughter experienced the last day of her summer job, this past Sunday. She worked at a popular, local ice cream shop near to one of our more beloved beaches. At dinner last night, my daughter told my husband and I that what she loved most about this particular job, is that it “brought her back to herself” again. Needless to say, this perked my ears.

“I lost myself a little bit, at the end of spring semester,” she said honestly and earnestly. “And these kind, fun, full of camaraderie people whom I worked with, along with the regular, supportive customers, and the excited, happy-go-lucky vacationing out-of-towners, brought me back to my natural self.”

Our daughter is a rising sophomore at a large, competitive university. None of her closest friends from high school ended up attending this same university with her, so she had to navigate a lot on her own, this past freshman year, in an environment that sometimes felt like swimming with the sharks, to her. I told my daughter how proud I was of her, for her considerate self-awareness. I reminded her what a good lesson she has learned, and I hope that she will be able to remember it, and to apply it, for the rest of her life.

“It is healthy and important to limit interactions with people who make you feel ‘less than’, or who you are afraid to be your true self with – these are not your people,” I said to her. “How you feel around a person speaks volumes. You must be true to yourself. You will never be happy if you feel that you can’t be the authentic version of the one-and-only-you. We all get cheated when people aren’t able to be fullest and deepest and truest expression of their own unique selves. People who accept you, and love you for your own distinctive qualities are the best kind of people there are in this world. Remember to be that kind of person for other people, too.”

The ice cream shop coworkers were a hodgepodge of older, full-time managers and workers, college students from all different universities and colleges, working for the summer, and a few high school students sprinkled in for good measure. Based on the funny stories, the social events they had with each other outside of work, and the support and cooperation and consideration shown to each other during busy, bustling work nights (all things which our daughter had relayed to us throughout the summer), it became extremely evident, that this eclectic group of people made for an amazing, good-for-the-soul, mix of coworkers and friends.

Sometimes in life, when all of the individual ingredients are so wholesome and incredible on their own merit, and they come together in one spot, you end up with something like an absolutely unbeatable, unforgettable delicious hot fudge sundae. For me, the fact that my daughter learned to appreciate the goodness and the sweetness of people who make you comfortable to be fully yourself, the people who help you to bring “the you” out of you, and who celebrate you and appreciate you, is the biggest, juiciest, most delightful cherry on top, of this memorable experience, in her young adult life.

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

Ring Ring

In Indonesia, the words for “thank you” are “terima kasih,” which, if you translate them literally, mean “accept love for what it is.”
– Tamalia Alisjahbana 

Thank you, readers, for being here to witness my writing. Accept my love for what it is. I appreciate you.

Yesterday, I did a tiny, easy thing for myself and for the people in my household which will make a major difference for all of us, for the rest of this year and beyond. I figured out how to turn off the ringers on our landline phones. For years now, we have been annoyed and pestered by the loud ringing, often at ungodly times, of the landline phones (one that sits right next to me on my desk as I write).

Now, I already know what you are thinking right at this moment. I’m kind of psychic. You won’t be the first to have this thought. My husband and my kids and my friends have pointedly asked me the same thing, many, many times. Why do we still have landline phones? The long answer is this: I have a very stubborn, obstinate, old-fashioned part of myself whom everyone I care about abhors. However, I adore her. Her reasoning for the landline is this: it’s cheap, it’s a good second option for people to be able to reach you without having to give them your cell phone number, and it’s a great second option for “911” calls. (In case Freddy Krueger shows up at my house, I want backup.) And (consider yourself warned) the more people in her life who ask her, “Why do we still have landline phones?”, the more she digs in her heels.

So, for now and for the unforeseen future, the landline stays. But since the landline’s phone number has been in circulation for a few years now, the telemarketers have it on their primetime lists, and the landline calls at our home have become more frequent, annoying and untimely as time has gone on. So yesterday, instead of yelling, rolling my eyes, picking up the phone and slamming it down on someone’s poor ears or running over to the phone, in a panic, wondering if there was some emergency/catastrophe that I needed to attend to, I actually took the time to figure out how to turn off the ringers on the phones. And it wasn’t hard. It didn’t take much time at all. And I already have been breathing easier, just a day into the peace and quiet which this action has brought to me.

I often talk about self-awareness on this blog. It occurred to me yesterday, that when I feel annoyed and irked by anything, I should use this as a signal to pause and to question whether there is any action that I can take that would change this annoyance in my life, which I have grown to just accept. It’s amazing how many little irritations we just accept in our lives, without questioning if there might be simple solutions to the problem, in order to ease the pain. Are those cute, but pinchy, painful shoes really worth achy feet? Pitch them. Is it possible to easily and inexpensively change out that sticky door handle? Do it. Are you constantly annoyed by someone’s tardiness or rudeness? Know your personnel. Take steps to avert and change any situation that you foresee will annoy you. You are worth it!

I am so happy to have my uninterrupted peace and quiet this morning. I am a little miffed at myself that I didn’t take action to figure out the phone ringers sooner. Still, the past is in the past, and I am now sitting in the peaceful, quiet present, quite pleased with myself. And it’s delicious. And I still have my back-up plan in case Freddy Krueger stops by.

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

Gulp

I am having some less than flattering self-awareness moments recently. First, someone was trying to schedule something with me and I started rattling off, “Well, I have a mammogram, and then my husband has a colonoscopy, and then I am going to be having some dental work done (interspersed with the thought, “Oh yikes, did I pick up our prescriptions?) and then my husband has a dermatologist appointment . . . “

And that’s when I realized that I belong on one of those Progressive Dr. Rick commercials. “Help for people who are becoming their parents.”

Second, my poor, sweet husband asked me what I planned on doing yesterday afternoon and he opened a Pandora’s box that he didn’t see coming. I honestly knew that he meant the question innocently. As he calmly (and tentatively) explained at dinner yesterday, he didn’t want to make the lunchtime conversation all about himself, and I knew that this was a fact, even as snakes were popping out of my head, and fire was shooting out of my eyes, when he originally asked the question. There was no judgmental, accusational tone in his question. The judgment was all mine, and I was projecting.

“What are you going to do now? What’s next? What are your plans?”

I’ve been doing this same judgmental projecting a lot lately, when friends, family members, and acquaintances, innocently ask me what my plans are now that I am an empty nester. The question stresses me because I haven’t honed in on the answer yet, and that bothers me. I’m a goal directed person. I am a Sagittarius with a pointed arrow. I am used to my time being so scheduled up by other people’s schedules, that I barely have time to think. Now I have time to think. Now I have a pretty empty slate. And my judgmental, bitchy, pressuring alter-ego, loves to ask myself those same questions, but with an unquestionable judgy, impatient, hypercritical, tsk-tsk tone. Hence, beware the poor person who is just being kind, and curious, and interested in me, when they innocently ask, “Oh, so what are your plans now?”

If I don’t contain myself, my defensive response is an either frosty, or fiery (depending on the day and the importance of keeping the relationship), “I plan to rip your head off and feed it to my flying monkeys.”

The key to any kind of change in life is becoming self aware. This I know. I think that if I become more kind and patient and allowing of myself to take my time strolling on to this new path in my life, I am less likely to take offense of other people’s questions about my life. If I allow myself to become less high strung and stop the need for fast-pacing and marching straight ahead, and instead, allow myself some slow meandering, I will see other people’s interest in me, and concern for me, in a different light. I don’t have all my plans set out for this new path, but one thing is for certain, I don’t want to have to walk my new path alone.

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

Prisoners

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What has you imprisoned? Now you may scoff and say, “Nothing has me imprisoned. I am a free thinker from a free country.” But, if we are honest with ourselves, we all have the things in our lives that imprison us. And usually, we don’t even realize this fact until usually some life crisis or a big change in our lives happen that makes us do a whole lot more self examination than we typically take the time to do, on a daily basis. (This is the hidden blessing of crises. Crises make us get really real with our own selves, if we want to rise out of our crises, like a phoenix from the fire. Otherwise we just succumb to difficulties and wonder “why me?”)

What is imprisoning you? Your financial obligations? Your lifestyle? Your daily habits or even addictions? Your need to please others? Your concern about image and what other people think about you? Your religious/political beliefs that may have been imposed upon you as a child – have you ever really examined these beliefs to see if they really are truly your own beliefs? Your sense of duty? Do your fears about the future, or your regrets about the past imprison you, keeping you frozen and catatonic? Your need to be “right”? Your beliefs about “others” and what they think and do? What about your beliefs about yourself, do they imprison you by making you stay in a certain “mold”, a mold that maybe you never intentionally created, but was fitted for you by someone else, or even by society?

What has you imprisoned? Where do you feel free in your life, and where do you feel stuck? Are the choices which you are making in your life, truly the right ones for you? You are the key, to get out of the prisons of your own making. We all have prisons that we have created for ourselves, and we all have the keys to get out of them. However, it is impossible to escape from a prison that you don’t admit that you are in, in the first place. Don’t be your own jailer. Make the changes in your life, that you need and want to make. These changes are your keys out of prison. Self awareness and courage will bring you to the ability to make changes, which will ultimately bring you to your freedom – your freedom to be the ultimate expression of your own true self.

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

I’m Not Creative

One of the biggest fallacies people think is, “I’m not a creative person.”  That is just not the truth.  We are all creative.  By definition, we are creation and we are co-creating to make this current world that we live in.  People think creative people are just the artists or the musicians or the poets.  But isn’t designing a car or coming up with a new scientific theorem or looking at a math problem at a different angle creative?  On a micro-level, we are all creating our own individual lives.  We don’t like to think like this because it forces a true level of self awareness.  Life isn’t just “happening” to us.  Yes, there are some forces outside of our control, but how we react to those forces is all on us.

I think what is good about the big “crossroads” moments in our lives, when the big changes happen, is that this self awareness of how much we do to create the lives that we live, really comes into focus.  I read once that we should look at ourselves as our own life managers.  How is your life manager doing?  Would you give her a raise?  Would you want to fire him?  We create our lives from the minute we wake up to the moments we go to bed.  The morning rituals that we have, whether we drink coffee or read the paper or hit the snooze button ten times are all of our own creations.  What we do all day, how we react to people and situations, what we wear, how we decorate our living spaces are all of our own creations.  The neighborhoods we choose to live in, the schools we send our kids to, how we interact with our kids and our spouses and our friends and our pets, again are our own daily creations.   The foods we choose to cook and eat and nourish our bodies with are our choices and thus, our life creation.  Finally, how many pillows we choose to sleep with, who we choose to sleep with, what temperature we set the thermostat to when we fall asleep is part of our life’s creation.

I’m currently reading a book/workbook called Design the Life You Love by Ayse Birsel.  Ms. Birsel owns a design firm and has designed/redesigned all sorts of everyday items down to a toilet seat that she claims is the most comfortable toilet seat in the world!   She says that most designing is really just redesigning.  In the book, Ms. Birsel talks about the fact that to redesign something you have to break it down to its smallest component parts and then build it back up to a better design that better fits your current lifestyle.  You can only reconstruct when you deconstruct.  So, to deconstruct your life, you have to look at each component that makes up your daily experience.  Family, Work, Friends, Hobbies, Interests, Health, etc. are all smaller components of what is comprising the totality of our lives.  When you break your life down to these smaller parts, you can then look at the individual parts and think to yourself, “What’s working for me in this part of my life?   What are small creative changes that I could make here that would make a difference in making my whole life more fulfilling?”

There are so many distractions in today’s world.  It can be very confusing to understand what is best for yourself.  I recently watched a movie called Ingrid Goes West.  The heroine of the movie is Ingrid and she has absolutely no self concept.  She stalks “internet celebrities” and tries to become them in order to get people to like her.  Obviously, this plan backfires on her, but in the end, when she is totally alone and has no choice but to be authentically herself, acknowledging all of her own pain and fear, is when people reach out to her and truly relate to her and understand her.  I think most of us confuse “creative” with “authentic”.  We respond to people’s art or music or websites because we feel connected to the creator of the creation.  The people we call creative are just responding to the deepest part of themselves that just can’t help but come out.  It has to be shared because it feels like it is that person’s primal drive or need to create it for no other reason than the pure joy of creating it. We feel utterly inspired by seeing their creative process in action because deep down we know that we are creators, too.  How many times have we heard an amazing artist or musician or writer or actor or businessman say that while they appreciate the accolades and external validation, the truth is they would be doing whatever they are doing for free, by themselves, in the middle of the woods, because it is their passion, their need, their desire, their creation, their authentic life???

Variety is the spice of life.  I believe that with my whole heart.  Life would be so boring if we were all the same.  I think life would be even spicier if we let our varieties shine not just in big endeavors, but in the ways we choose to go about our daily habits.  We are all creative.  We are all creators and there is no better time than now to live our own authentic, true self lives every moment of every day.