When my mom was living near me, I relished the status quo. I can’t say it was my comfort zone—we didn’t have the best relationship, I’ll confess—but each day it seemed there was some new challenge to face (avoid?). Oh, how I would have loved life to just stop and wait for my mind to catch up to what we were facing, get a handle on the complications of her situation, feel like making a decision. It never did.
Most of your resolutions and things you want to change are not automatic. They are new and related to things you don’t like about yourself: flabby body, too scattered and not centered, focused on day-to-day and not connecting with others. But you actually have a lot going for you and these things are connected to what you want and how you want to be.
I am not a great leader of the masses. I don’t believe it is my life’s role to lead a contingent into salvation, peace, and enlightenment. When I think about my desire for “world peace” I can either get helplessly catatonic over that fact or wipe my hands and say, “Phew! Thank goodness we had Jesus, Buddha, MLK, Nelson Mandela to take us there,” at least in part. But seriously, where have all the cowboys gone?
Sometimes we do things just because we’ve been doing them for so long, even though we’ve lost the meaning, the importance, the connection to our true self.
It was a cool spring evening and the shear curtains in my small, shared bedroom billowed as the pleasant, westerly breeze wafted through the house. But I couldn’t enjoy the early spring warmth, the smell of the setting sun and just-blooming lilacs. I was frozen, face-down and stiff in my bed with all the lights on. I was petrified, certain he was hovering outside that dark window watching me.
I remember when my children were young and the blur of life back then. I was exhausted at times, but mostly I was amazed watching these little beings we somehow created grow and explore the world. I admit there were times when I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing, but we had made the conscious choice to build a family; it was what I truly wanted in my life.
But I forgot.
Brenè Brown says, in a recent Good Life Project podcast, “The greatest pain I’ve ever seen in my work is from people who’ve spent their lives on the outside of the arena wondering what would have happened had I shown up. That’s a pain that …has become a far greater fear of mine than having to dodge some hurt feelings sometimes. What if I would have shown up and didn’t sing?”
Not singing is not an option for me anymore.
My problem? I don’t know what’s in my arena.
When I think of love, my mind immediately goes to Dictionary.com’s definition of the word in terms of a relationship and a feeling: a strong feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, such as for a parent, child, friend, or pet. Ahhhh. Don’t we all want that.
You know something needs to change. You recognize the void, feel the emptiness. You hear the small voice of discontent whispering in your soul. Maybe it’s a new voice. Maybe it’s been there so long it owns a beach house on the outer banks of your mind.
The question is: Are you willing to change? Is the pain of staying the same finally greater than the fear of actually doing something different?
When suffocating within my own negative thoughts, struggling to communicate effectively with a loved one, I can step outside and notice the scar on the pine tree damaged years ago by a bolt of lightning. Hurt by a power much greater than itself, it still stands, tall, strong, reaching for the sky amid the other trees vying for the same rays of energy.
Nature does that for me.
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