Category: Examples of an Imperfect woman

“Everybody is unique.  Compare not yourself with anybody else lest you spoil God’s curriculum.”

             Baal Shemtov

 

I wrote out a Birthday Card and choose that quote, and then I said, “Enjoy being you, since no one else can!” 

 

It often seems, we feel we fall short of the mark of being ourselves, yet is that possible?

 

I also said that in each day there are presents to open up.  If you look around, you will see wonderful displays just waiting for your eyes to fall upon them.

 

While delivering mail yesterday, I was presented with wonderful cloud formations.  In fact, I am sure I was a little bit slower on the route, because I was cloud gazing mailman, but the designs and colors were awesome.

 

In the moment when I bumped into my long lost sister, I was almost left with feeling that, I could have brought more, said more, done more and then I thought more of what?

 

What more can I be than Me? 

 

How can we plan in advance for a chance encounter?

 

All we can literally do is be ourselves or pretend not to be.

 

What is the line “To be or not to be.”

 

I heard a about a new book twin brothers wrote called, “Either You Are In, or You Are In The Way.”  Isn’t that an awesome title! 

 

I took it that either you are in your life, or in the way of your life as it is happening.

 

When I get stuck on thought patterns like “If only, I wish, she should have….I am in the way of life as it is happening right now.

 

The present is arriving while I am wool gathering.  Wool gathering I believe is an old fashion term for dreaming.

 

Maybe we need to change that phrase to Lie Gathering!

 

We are gathering lies against what is, a bag full of them like ammunition to the present moment, killing all hopes of Now.

 

We even gather lies about ourselves, we should have, could have, etc instead of being ok with what we did.

 

This also got me to thinking of what a sister looks like, acts like, and is?  Isn’t that going to depend on the individual wearing the sister sweater?  Somehow we actually look at the sweater and then not see who is wearing it.

 

We focus on the pretty sweater called Sister and not see who is beneath and their actions.

 

I have disrobed all my sisters of their sweaters and then while naked I watched them be.

 

Alone without the benefits that seem to come with sister sweaters, just standing there being themselves.

 

The benefits that seem to come with the sweater is that it camouflages the being beneath.

 

In my life the sweater never was the issue, and there are Mom sweaters, Dad sweaters, Brother sweaters, all are designed so it seems to cover up the individual beneath.

 

As I see it, society at large is hell bent on saving the ‘family’ of sweaters at all costs.

 

Once I took off all the sweaters I was astounded at what lay beneath, even of myself.  I used to do many odd things wearing that sweater!

 

We have a sticker in the rear window our El Camino “Ride Naked!” 

 

My husband and I arrive at a local Art’s Festival, we have one hour before the Artists close shop, the weather is breaking, it seems the sun will peek out, I am excited to see what is underneath each tent.

 

We make a right to glimpse at the first booth we happen upon, and standing there is my sister dressed in Harley clothes, her cop husband right behind her, I pause a second and my hand reaches out to tap her shoulder.  “Hey, is this my sister?”….she turns, smiles and reaches to hug me.  We embrace.

 

I played in my head a myriad of ways this would all go down, and I was pretty close on target.

 

Her and I have not spoken nor seen each other in 2 years.

To find her in the midst of Art Festival seems almost appropriate, for I was looking for things that would catch my attention.

 

Her back was to me, so I could have walked around her, and maybe if my husband weren’t there, I would have.  I felt like hiding and then instead moved forward to engage, I was most shocked by that.

 

Our conversation was brief, she was on her way for a Sunday ride, her husband was volunteering in a food booth, they appeared as a miss matched pair, he with his Sunday casual and Nametag, her in all leather, with a headscarf to match. 

 

We have an ocean of things that lay between us, some said, many left unopened, avenues shut down due to lack of travel, the past weighed heavy and the future silent, the moment was pregnant with possibilities.

This time I took her lead and allowed it to remain where she was comfortable, skimming along the surface with social words.

 

It seemed odd to me that I went along, and when we parted I felt the exchange wasn’t between two sisters, like I had been ripped off, wanting more but knowing more wasn’t mine to have.

 

It wasn’t the time nor the place to sit down and reconnect or connect, what felt good to me, was my absence of being mad. 

 

I felt I was in the moment doing all that the moment required, I didn’t drag in the past nor promise the future.  I met her there among the beautifully carved individual works of Art.

 

My amazement always goes to the Universe and how it can move both of us in the precision it takes to have us meet at that moment in time.

 

There was no sadness, no regret, no wishing, no hating, nothing as I walked away.  I felt wonderful to simply let her go, alone without me adding a segment of commands upon her.

 

She doesn’t have to call me, for she doesn’t, she doesn’t have to entertain me, plan to meet, seek to get together with me, nothing, she is free to go her own way.

 

I wondered about me, what I would say, what I would feel, and I now believe that we will meet when we do and it will be the same. 

 

I can simply not require more.  I moved to hug this girl, this little girl who when we were but wee things, I held her hand. 

 

Yet in that moment, she was just someone who listened at the time I needed, and then stopped wanting to hear.  I have respected her silence and gave her space.

 

In that space she is free to do what it is she wants to do.

 

She just doesn’t do sister, the intimate level sister she can only be the social sister.

 

I met my social sister sister and I wanted more, it seems I am always sitting in the spot of more.

 

In among the great objects of Art I found her and she is unique, she is different, can I look at her like that?  Do I have a choice? 

 

The diamond in the rough, the potential that lurks, if only escapes us both, the wrong time, the wrong place, no time and no place, moments that are awkward at best, missing more than they hold…..

 

In the space where sisterhood should lay it is so cluttered up that there is no space for me, no time for me, no effort left for me.

 

Until then, I miss what could have been.

 

Laughing.  Have you ever pondered a Laugh?  My kids and I were sitting there, and they were commenting on my laugh.

 

“Did you see her, her head is thrown back….for like a long time.”  And I said, “I wasn’t done laughing yet.”

 

I do laugh with my head back, and it comes from deep inside of me, I am not sure where all the laughs are stored and how you get the kind you get, but it seems to be unique.

 

You can’t plan for a laugh or make one come, it just simply comes rushing forth and lasts as long as something is funny!

 

Isn’t if funny that we have to think something is funny?  How do we know what is funny and what isn’t?  And it seems that not every one sees funny as funny!

 

It is wonderful to find a people you can laugh with.  Laughing until your belly hurts and your face gets tired of grinning.

 

On of my daughter’s shoulders go up and down when she laughs, and if she laughs too long she has sore shoulders, her muscles get tired.

 

I am wondering if laughing is like crying, just another expression of a feeling.

 

Expressions of feelings that seems right.

 

How did we begin to label feelings?  We must have made up thoughts to go with the feelings and then it became our meaning of ‘happiness’ or of ‘sadness’.

 

It is almost like playing dress-up, we are adding thoughts upon feelings and then expressing it with our body language.

 

This all seems very personal and individual, that within our selves we decide what it is we love, what makes us laugh, what we cry over, and it just happens that we bump into people who have the same meanings.

 

And as far as laughs go, I am not sure what is normal, what is considered the perfect laugh, the perfect way to laugh and what is the perfect thing to laugh at, but you can certainly have it upside down and backwards.

 

Some people can laugh at dirty words, or humor that is harming another, sadistic humor, so I know that if we can laugh inappropriately, we then can love wrong, be sad for the wrong reasons, and even be happy and free selfishly.

 

Are we are born with the innate and natural responses, but life then teaches us differently, do we come in with a clean slate and we are written upon by the folks around us, as Dr. Phil says?

 

If I look backwards into my home environment as a child, I can see how my meanings developed, how I then continued forward carrying my definitions of love.

 

“Left alone in my head without adult supervision,” is what my sister said. 

 

It is like packing all the inappropriate things for a trip!

 

As children we packed our suitcases of love alone, we tossed into it whatever others told us was love.  And in some cases, actions they told us were loving, and in other cases we just called it love.

 

How amazing that we may still be carrying around suitcases we packed as children and believing full heartedly in their contents!

 

My suitcase was discovered to be full of things that were not suited for love, not worthy of self care or self love, my whole suitcase had things that either loved unworthiness or made me unworthy, there wasn’t a single grain in there worth keeping.

 

I had to repack it all.  At first this task seemed overwhelming and fraught with danger and fear!  Fear that I would not find love or that love would not find me.  It is like you are traveling along with an empty suitcase hoping to fill it up.

 

Looking endlessly outside for a feeling that arises inside.

 

What I didn’t know was that I was the suitcase and the feelings arrive in me and that I can now honor that feeling with the appropriate action and label my thoughts.

 

I now have a voice, with big words and am allowed to reject things that are inappropriate in the category called love and put them in their proper place!

 

I am now traveling forward packing and unpacking, adding and removing items that no longer serve me and who I am today.

 

With great understanding to the little girl who packed it back then, I now release her greatest efforts, her trying too hard, her responsibilities of other, her diminishing self.  I let go of all that she carried for naught.

 

"I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be."

~ Einstein

 

Little by little I am repacking this suitcase for the trip of a lifetime!

 

A lifetime called me!

 

 

“I no longer believe that we can keep silent.  We never really do, mind you.  In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.”

    (Things I Have Been Silent About)   Azar Nafisi

 

 

I love how she says we articulate what has happened to us by the people we become.

 

That even if they all guard their words, and keep silent about unspeakable things, in the end we are the proof that ‘something’ happened.

 

My life is the proof, the way I act, the things I do or don’t do, and all my quirky idiosyncrasies are like a hidden treasure map pointing back.

 

I am who I am today coming from whence I came!

 

I am a perfect articulation growing up in the environment that I did.

 

We learn how to deal with others, the world and ourselves by naturally emulating what our parents do or what situations we had to live with.

 

The characteristics we carryon generation upon generation boggles the mind. 

 

I used to say that I learned more of what not to do by watching others, yet in the end I was more like my mother than not.

 

We both carried the same toolbox, inside were two ways of dealing.  One was to holler louder and more often and the second was stone cold silence and walking away!

 

I recall many many times, too many to count, that she ran away.  She would go away for the weekend, run and not look back, no phone number would she leave, disappear for days, and I was left in charge.

 

So for those days, I would stand in her shoes, her mess and her turmoil, forced to take care of her life. 

 

Left with many little kids and babies with various needs, menus and food, bottles and diapers, older kids disrespect –for they were free of mom and let loose- I was left to deal the best way I could.

 

She may have found temporary relief, for she came back rested and ready to once again pickup her life. 

 

I resented the hell out of that technique.

 

Maybe all those times were preparing me for the biggest mess of my life! 

 

And ironically or not, she went on a trip of her lifetime to Australia in the first months of her granddaughter stating her grandfather (her husband) molested her, she was once again far far away from her life.

 

I remember not even being surprised, for it was sooo typical.

Here we were her kids, once again in various stages of need, sitting in the biggest mess of all, a mess the two of them created, and she was no where to be found.

 

This time, I could not step in and keep the boat floating until she came back, it tipped.

 

That was probably the first time I didn’t try and keep things going, the first time I said no, the first time I allowed the messes to just lay there uncovered up. 

 

My phone rang and rang and rang.  Her children calling me crying, hollering, wondering and confused, calling me, for she wasn’t available.  I listened and heard things too many to count, all affects of living in that home, I heard the cries and heard the denial, yet there was nothing I could do.

 

Somehow, someway I stood and listened, while my whole life was dying. 

 

I am not sure what they all wanted or what I was supposed to do, but what I did was simply stand in the mess and tell them what was there.

 

I stood alone separated from her life, yet in a mess anyway.

 

What I did know now was why. 

 

Why I was the way I was, why she ran when she ran, the why of this and the why of that, yet I didn’t know how to fix any of it.

 

It is hard to phantom how a mother could run so far away or how a child makes it through the roughest spots alone.

 

My mother’s mother died when my mother was two, she was motherless, and somehow I feel the same.  The time when I needed her the most, and when my siblings needed her the most, she ran.

It is my belief that at those times, something came in for her to deal with and without tools to deal, she ran.

 

Running and hollering as far as I can tell don’t fix anything.

 

Finding a third answer was my goal.  Mostly what helped was standing in reality and dealing with what is.

 

Maybe that alone is the third answer.

 

Once I got used to walking fearlessly where few would trod, to pick up a pedophile here and a wounded part of me there, and really seeing an absent mother, and feeling all that was required, I was unlearning many things.

 

Unlearning is like unwinding a top that is so tightly wound.  It is like I was turning and turning and turning trying to fit her ideal of me, societies ideal of me, spun into something I didn’t even know. 

 

The unlearning is unwinding layer by layer all the things I did, for all the wrong reasons.

 

I can see now stepping in for her allowed her to be lazy in her life.  Trying to keep her boat floating allowed it to stay afloat for that many more years, it may have been better for it to sink earlier.  How many girls were damaged while I kept her boat floating?

 

My little hands grew into big hands rowing her boat to hell.  We were in the same boat heading in the same direction.  And in addition my children came into the same little rowboat!

 

I learned that lesson the hard way. I will not pick up an oar in another’s boat, nor do I expect my children to row for me, or anyone.

 

I love that we each have our own little rowboats! 

I have no idea where this little boat will take me, what sights I will see, when the river will require me to paddle like hell, or when I can sit back and enjoy the ride, but I am eternally grateful that I am able to row alone.

 

“Row Row Row your boat gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily, Life is But A DREAM!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Things I have been silent about,” by Azar Nafisi.

 

Don’t you love that title?  This is a book on CD that I have been listening to.

 

She began keeping a journal on things she was keeping silent about.

 

There seems to be a space in all of us, a dark space, a cavern where we put all the things we are too afraid to talk about.   We are silent for many reasons, silent but knowing.

 

 “Airing our dirty laundry” isn’t it odd that we teach our children there are unmentionables! 

 

What are the unmentionables?  Aren’t we then presenting an off balance world, paying attention only to the mentionables!

 

As a child my world was way of kilter, so far off to one side that I myself grew up off balanced. 

 

Imagine instead if I had the whole picture, if all spoke of how my father molests little girls?   I guess in hindsight they did, but they spoke in whispers about it, it was a secret. 

 

My mother’s silence was the deadliest.

 

In their silence, I felt that I had the wrong impression of my father, for the rest seemed to treat him as though he was normal. Yet I could never do the same, ever.

 

My world finally made sense when I heard that there was a reason my body feared him.  I understood my imbalance.

 

My secret was that my body feared him even if my mind held no pictures or words to go along with it, I was terrified to be left alone with my father even as an adult.  In my silence I never told any one.

 

My fear was totally irrational it seemed, for as I looked around at the rest of my family, No one but me seemed to feel that way.

 

What I was left with then was, ‘there must be something wrong with me!’

 

You then walk around off balance inside and it seems you can never make the correction alone.  There wasn’t anything it seemed I could do to make me not afraid.

 

I was left being a bad daughter.

 

The silence in our home about all of this didn’t make it balanced.  The silence didn’t preserve a normal family or keep an untarnished image, no instead it kept dysfunction alive and growing like a malignant tumor spreading unchecked.

 

My mother and father may have had a cave full of things that they too didn’t talk about, but that I can’t know.

 

All I do know is that just because we didn’t talk about it, it didn’t make it go away.

 

You can tuck and bury it under piles stuff and pretty words, good intentions, forgiveness of sins, doing good deeds, but underneath all of that it remains unchanged.

 

No matter how silent we were nothing changed the facts.

A bell was rung and we all pretend in our silences to not have heard it.

 

Silence, the word itself has two drastically different sides.

One is to sit with the absence of noise, alone in an oasis of peace, the other refusing to acknowledge or express something that you know.

 

As I sit here today four and a half years after breaking my silence, I know that the silence did as much or more damage as the rape itself.

 

My little childhood friend who was raped with me, she too kept silent, I am not sure why?  Two hurt little girls walking forward in silence.

 

Going back and trying to understand it even now as an adult is unimaginable, harder yet being so little, what could we say and to whom?  Did we try and air our dirty laundry?

 

What made us remain silent and does it matter why?

Aren’t there always ‘good reasons’ to remain silent?

 

Fear I would have to say is right up near the top.

Fear is the key that locks the door of silence. 

 

It is odd as I write that, that not only did I fear my father, but I was fearful of talking about it.

 

All my fears were realized when I did break my silence, the worst happened.  Darkness did descend upon my family, the clouds came in and eclipsed the sunshine my mother tried to build, down went the façade and tarnish found its way into everything.  All the pretend normal disappeared.

 

Silence was a game of pretend!

 

In the past few days I have been trying to blog about thoughts.  Just thoughts and how those thoughts can move us here and there and everywhere, yet what is a thought and where did it come from and who is in charge of changing them so we can change our lives?

 

It seems that thoughts, since we all have them would be easy to write about.  Thoughts happen each and every moment, so what is the big deal.

 

Where do thoughts come from and what are their purposes and who is in charge of them once they arrive.

 

Are thoughts born and do they die? Are there millions of thoughts or are there the same thoughts repeated a million times?

 

Do thoughts lead us or do we lead the thoughts?

Where do you find thoughts and what do they look like?

How can you describe a thought physically, is that possible?

 

When you open up our brains will you find all our thoughts lying there?

 

In order to get a handle on thoughts we first have to see what they are?

 

Watching for thoughts could that be a pastime like ‘bird watching’ to see them come in and then what we do, how we respond and what we do with the thought.

 

I am betting that the same thoughts come in and we do the same thing.

 

We are the perfect dance partners to the thought, we move as one.

 

What would happen if we didn’t make the same move, if we just changed it up a bit? Or danced with different thoughts not the same ones?

 

What is in your garden of thoughts today?  What thoughts are making you anxious?  What thoughts are nagging at you to do something you have no desire to do?  Are they true for you thoughts?  Do they honor who you are and your inner peace?

 

What is a true for you thought?

How does it match up to your experience?

What is it asking you to do?

Are you being asked to leave your business and to get into someone else’s?

 

Investigating thoughts, your thoughts, is a full time business, just as being in your own life is a full time business.

 

Each and every time I fall out of my life, it was because I was trying to do a life for someone else.

 

The great news is that we all get to do our own thoughts.

We all have them.  Each person gets a busload of thoughts to play with, there really is no need to get into other people’s buckets, let them deal with their own thoughts!

 

And really what would that look like to sort out another person’s thoughts? 

 

When you realize that you can investigate a thought and if it is no longer true for you, you get to change your moves, it allows you to live life much more freer.

 

I am no longer afraid of thoughts, and when I find myself dancing moves that seem awkward at best, I go in and find the thought that corresponds, and investigate. 

 

So it isn’t about the thoughts themselves, but rather how we dance with them and which ones.  I still am not sure where they come from or where they go, all I can do is meet them and bring them into my reality seeing if they fit!

 

Depending upon how I move about my day today you will know which thoughts I took seriously.

 

If you can’t grab a thought and explore it, explore what it is you do!  That is the affects of believing a thought!

 

If your life was a silent movie what story would it tell?

Could we discern your thoughts by how you move?

Do your actions and thoughts match?

 

A walking contradiction partly truth and partly fiction, that song refrain runs through my head.

 

What is your reality and does it match your actions?

 

I lived like mismatched socks for most of my life. 

My actions and my thoughts were not in sync.

I am now trying to live like a matched set.

 

Where my inner and outer match, where reality and my thoughts about reality are in perfect step.

 

She marches to the beat of her own drum!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How do you know when to stop?  When is it time?  What inside of us says ok that is enough?  Somehow we continue to do things over and over and over, until.

 

Who decides the Until, when to say when, when enough is enough?

 

What changes inside?  The saying, “the straw that broke the camels back” or “that was the last straw” means there is a point where we are incapable of going further.  Is there a line that we will not cross and we are unaware of it until it happens?

 

The endurance of the body and mind to continue in a pattern over and over and over again, and its capacity to hold more than it seems possible to hold, is remarkable. 

 

It is so intriguing to me that out of the clear blue or so it seems it stops and simply says, “no more I am full!”

 

I wonder if like our belly signal of being full, can this button get out of whack and we pile stuff in long after the full signal is given, like a faulty switch.

 

We then ‘overeat’ years of abuse by failing to say I am full, I can fit no more in, but yet something gives.

 

We are overeating things that are not good for us.  Like getting used to eating foods that carry no nutritional value, we are used to people with no self-love value.

 

Our lives become accustomed to craving the antics and the behaviors that carry nothing for our self worth, our self love, nothing that we can use to empower ourselves, instead it continues to whittle away at the person inside, until it seems the self disappears.

 

The self disappears inside, but oddly enough it pops up outside in a million different places and people.  Our sense of self is now contingent on others good opinion, for we lost our self inside.

 

How surprising it is that abuse diminishes the person inside, but it grows mighty large outside.

 

We will find it in everyone we meet, in all the things we own and the ones we don’t own yet, our self seems to be illusive and everywhere, unmanageable at best, relentless and demanding, forever one step ahead of us, we are now seekers of self chasing it outside, for we must have given our self away. 

 

Given our self away not once but a million times, until we are shattered and scattered into a million pieces.

 

How then do you get your self back inside?  How do you now go back and retrieve all that you gave away? 

 

How do you start to little by little, piece by piece, a tiny section here and teeny section there, bring it all back in?

 

In Dysfunction the sense of self is obese and no one even knows it.  It is large and covers areas beyond what the mind can hold.

 

The dysfunctional sense of self is outside of us and it is in anything and anybody who walks by.  We feel owned by the world, owned by others, and our own sense of self is nowhere to be found.

 

Without another person standing in front of us, we disappear.

 

I am amazed as I write this to understand how the self worth is diminished inside, while the monster outside seems to grow in leaps and bounds.

 

It pushed me back in my chair to realize that my whole sense of self was lost when my “outside” crashed.  I was left without me.

 

I was a whore for love and peace I discovered a few years back.  I gave myself up for others satisfaction, others needs, others this and others that.  I gave myself up in a million and one places, until.

 

My Until was when I could see clearly who it was I had given myself to.

 

I gave myself away.

 

I didn’t even care what they did to me, I was careless with me……

 

When I finally saw myself I was a broken mess. 

 

I am still in the ‘reconstruction’ phase and when I am feeling out of power that an outside source has more power over me, I know that my sense of self is inside.

 

Tirelessly I work pulling and tugging to get my sense of self back out of that item or person.

 

I usually can tell I am in there, when I feel that I own that. When my feelings get hurt depending upon what they do or don’t do, you can safely bet I am inside.

 

Bikram on his Yoga CD says, “If anyone can steal your peace, you are the loser.”

 

What I didn’t know was that I was the loser of self!

 

I now am finding myself in the oddest places and people. Yet I can see my intentions.

 

My intentions were to fill them up with whatever it was they thought they were missing.

 

It is incredible, we are all going around losing ourselves and then grabbing a sense of false self from others.

 

What if instead we stop this madness and Be whole without the other?

 

Like Byron Katie says, skip the middleman.

 

You be you and I be me!

You keep you all of you, and I will keep all of me.

Two people fully loaded a complete set of one!

 

 

 Expectation.

– anticipation of something happening: a confident belief or strong hope that a particular event will happen

–  notion of something: a mental image of something expected, often compared to its reality.

–  expected standard: a standard of conduct or performance expected by or of somebody.

 

There seems to be two ways to BE in this world, either walking with our expectations simply laid out ahead of us, or we are walking naked without expectations, surprised endlessly with what arrives?

 

You may not even know that you are smack dab in the middle of expectations, until you are frozen and unable to move without hurting someone?  We even have expectations that we will not hurt another, like that is our business?

 

I am beginning to see that all we can literally hurt is another’s expectations of us.

 

If I have expectations of another, it literally puts them in a position of being a puppet for me.

 

My expectations are requirements from them.

I am taking a part of them and owning it.

 

Is it possible to own a piece of someone and would you want to and why?

 

Why do I need a part of someone else? 

It seems really odd to me now, but I used to live in the land of expectations, in the sea of owning another’s life.

 

I used to own my children’s lives and I used to want my sisters and brothers to act a certain way for me, to make me feel special to make me feel loved and appreciated. 

 

It was a break through moment for me when I told my son, “Your job is to be a 12 year old boy.  Your job is not to make me happy.”

 

What a revelation that was for me.  Inside buried deep was this odd seeking device that was always looking for others to bring a part of me to me.

 

Like my son’s job was to make me a good mother?

How does that work?

 

Well in my old mindset, a good boy equals a good mother.

A bad boy equals a bad mother.

In order for me to be good, he had to be good.

There was no separation between the two of us.

 

When I separated from my mother, father and siblings, I could see where the dysfunction lay. We all were co-dependent upon each other.

 

I had never stood alone and separate, I never even had a free thought or moved in a direction that the whole did not approved of, I needed to make sure I didn’t mess up others expectations of me and ruin their good opinions.

 

Have you ever done the three-legged race, where you have to move in sync with someone else or you fall? That was me, I was forever tied up to someone’s leg.

 

That other leg was an expectation.

 

I cannot explain the weirdness to walk alone unencumbered by that third leg?  The freedom brings a lump to my throat. 

 

When I undid the ties, they too became free. 

 

I remember feeling so inept at walking alone. It was like this whole world was a foreign land.  I hardly ever made an independent choice one that was outside of an expectation of another.  In fact I always did my level best to not step out of line with the third leg.

 

It is pure joy to move along as one, to no longer need to ask the many legs if they want me to go in a certain direction.

 

I just sit with myself and see what it is I want to do, what honors me, what brings me peace inside.  I have no expectations even of myself.

 

I never know what it is I will do today or even in the next few hours.

But reality will arrive and I greet it and then I move.

 

I move as One.

 

 “The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don’t read what they write, don’t ask them what they believe, just observe what they do.”    Ashley Montagu

 

And what I am learning about myself is to watch what I do.

Just simply watch yourself, what your day consists of, where you go and what you do. 

 

Today I offered advice to a friend to simply do simple things.

And then I followed my advice and drove up to watch my husband and son as they worked on their project, clearing the land for a deer camp.  Just being there in the woods with them, seeing the changes of our land, seeing their excitement and to hear the possibilities of their dreams. 

 

My girls came too, and recalled the times spent catching frogs in that pond, then commenced to have a contest who could catch a frog first.

 

An hour of my day helping to carry branches, clearing the site, being involved in their world, making memories, adding on to life’s color.

 

“Life happens at the level of events, not words.” Alfred Adler

 

What I know to be true is that we are events happening all the time.  Some days the only event is being tired, or being bored, but nonetheless it is an event.

 

I am going to watch what kind of event I am.

 

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by day, in all the small uncaring ways.” 

Stephen Saint Vincent Benet

 

I wonder if we care about the wrong things, until death is at our doors?  Can we literally be careless with life until we are like dead men walking?

 

I am thinking we can be alive, breath coming in and out, but really living life is so different than just being alive.   

 

“One must lose one’s life in order to find it.”  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

 

I feel like I was reborn and that I am learning how to really live in my life, to experience and to be aware of many things.

To be open to doing and going places where before I had a preset of no.

 

Doesn’t it sometimes seem that the ones closest to death hang on more preciously to life, and those of us who ‘believe’ we have many years are so careless.

 

Do you know, are you sure, dare you be careless?

 

While we still have the choice to live while alive, let’s do it for the ones who have no choice.

 

Live like you are dying, and aren’t we all?

 

I am dying to Live!