Gathering My Lessons
I am constantly learning from my life. Someone special to me said that I could glean a lesson even from a recipe.
Which is what I did in my post, When The Recipes Must Go.
I call them Ahas. I can also stand on a Soapbox every once in a while.
And I learn some pretty big stuff from some little people in my life. The good and the bad and
the happy and the sad. My friendships are very important to me. The past holds some wisdom yet to be learned.
And my husband’s lessons are occasionally shared by his voice here. I may repeat myself, but guaranteed,
I’ll get you to think about life just a little differently.
The Year of Doing
This year was about doing. Saying I can because I did. And if I did, what else could I do? Because all the talking in the world doesn’t get it done. You can certainly plan out your steps. In fact that’s a great way to prepare to get it done. Pro-activity is always a plus. But getting it done turns out to be just you taking the time to do the work. My fear threatened to take me off the right track on these occasions when I went in for the work kill. There was a chorus of cants. I would just let them blow by me like the hot air that...
read moreWith No Definition of Success Or Enough, You’re a Hamster on a Wheel
I once read that you won’t know if you have succeeded if you don’t have a picture of what success looks like. I found that profound and daunting as I wasn’t allowed to succeed so I’d be unable to come up with that. I can also see now that having no definition of enough would wear one out in a never-ending pursuit of it. The proverbial hamster’s treadmill of running and never getting there. Yet aren’t these two words the hinge pin for American success? They used to call me the Energizer Bunny because I was...
read moreSeven Methods to Help Develop Self-Trust
I believe that the key to vanquishing our anxieties is in developing our self-trust. We are fearful of everything as long as we don’t think we have what it takes to make the decisions we need to make daily. We have trip anxiety and agoraphobia because we fear we can’t handle what’s next, even if we’ve proven ourselves capable countless times before. I am busy tweaking my self-trust through my intentional creativity. And I would like very much to get to a point where I not only trust myself, but value and revere what I...
read moreMy Choice and My Recipe for Happiness
My Happiness is mine to choose. And as overwhelming as that seems in choosing what that looks like, I’d rather the chance to vote. So I’ve embarked to rewrite my life script and reprogram my thoughts about me and my life that apparently hadn’t been working for me for a long time. They didn’t have a plan for me. I had to make one up for myself. It never occurred to me that I could choose happiness. I’d lived so long in misery by rules I assumed governed me, I saw no other choices. But there were so many choices I...
read moreHow I Survived the Speech
So I signed up to give a talk on the Inverse Relationship Between Creativity and Anxiety at my UU church this month. One of my learned life hacks is that if I need to do something, I just need to give my word to someone and I’ll do it. (I told one person I would sing an acapella song I had written at my wedding and so I did it. )And this public speech I gave was just a means to getting me to pen my theory. I needed to get myself through it. I knew it wasn’t going to be perfect, ever, but I needed to do it anyway. And so I stopped...
read moreTo Be at Home at Home
My rather pregnant friend and I were having lunch last month, she was free of her two year-old and me of my five year-old, and the freedom of having lunch together outside of our houses made us giddy. And I said that sometimes I feel like I’m a different person outside my home. And she agreed she felt that way too. It’s as if I am a prisoner of my house and all that’s wrong with it. The problems that are my problems to solve get topped by chores and meals and there’s no longer any room for me to breathe. Perhaps I...
read moreThe Subtleties of Shifts
(Originally published in December of last year, this post still makes more sense than not. Shift is perpetual and always in need of being actually seen.) Life’s best asset and worst downfall is that it takes its sweet time. That it is relentless in its expansive pardoning of our mistakes. Every day is a new day to start over seems like too much wiggle room for screw ups. But it also means that the daily monotony can lead to imperceptible shifts. Stuff that would pass you by unless you were wise enough to go looking for it. Or someone...
read moreInstead of Dread
We’ve had an unusually busy August and I have one last day to get through in a week-long run of big scary events. And I have been very conscious of fending off the dread. This final busy week included the last three band practices for my son’s band for the performance on the weekend, a fair that happens in my front yard, an out-of-town visitor, a public dance performance for Fiona, and preparation for a speech and art piece display for me. All great events yet there’s the wariness and dread of what you have to do likes to...
read moreHow Instagram Helped Cure Me of Anxiety
I love to connect with like-minded creative women on Instagram. This format of Social media (also known as a platform) became my preferred online social interaction as I was trying to build an audience for my blog. I very hesitantly joined communities and challenges and slowly started to poke my head out of my fear shell. And I credit Instagram and creativity for curing me of my anxieties. I’d never experienced community and was completely unsure of what it meant and how I was supposed to do it. I just knew that being witnessed by these...
read moreChoose to Not Choose is Still a Choice
She rather vehemently insisted that there are no choices. Thank you very little, she understands the concept of “everything is a choice”, just not for her. She’s resigned to that comfortable hell of nothing changes because perhaps it is too overwhelming to consider those other choices. To allow for change would be to admit that had always been a choice perhaps? The march of the musts is way more familiar. And maybe familiar trumps joy? At some cellular level, joy is just another hell. It is painfully unfamiliar. Why want something that...
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