I M Perfect lady

Tag: mistakes

  • Treat the Mail Lady

    After 7 months of delivering mail, I have come to conclusion I will never be 100% accurate, for no matter how hard I try, there always seems to be letters that cling to each other and one gets filed wrong into the wrong box or I get names and addresses transposed and there they sit waiting for the owner of the mailbox to discover my ineptness.

    Of course my errors always land in mailboxes of perfect people, people who have never made an error in their lives, and instead of just putting my error back in the box and gently put up the flag for me to pick it up, they hand deliver it back to the Post Office so my boss can see.

    It is like I have a club of tattle tellers! For luck would have it, I am a repeat offender to the ones who are not willing to keep it just between us.

    As a mail lady, I can tell you a few things you can do to make the mail lady’s day.

    If I make a mistake, just slip it back in the box and raise the flag, I will pick it up and understand why you didn’t want it.

    When you do get one of my errors, I would appreciate if you didn’t write on the envelope, “Wrong Address” for the real owner will know it has taken a detour along the way.

    Running a mail route is like filing letters but our files are miles apart and when we make a mistake there are people in the files hollering at us. Okay, not all but a few loud mouths.

    And these loud mouths are usually owners of mailboxes whose doors don’t stay shut or are hard to open, have red flags missing and then complain when I don’t pick up their mail, have boxes set too far off the road or tilted too far back that I can’t retrieve their mail easily.

    It seems they take joy in finding my mistakes but overlook their own.

    However, there are some delightful people who are kind and have the patience and understanding and just slip my mistake back in the box in silence…and even put notes reminding me that their mail is on hold.

    Most are good caretakers of their boxes and actually worry about making it easier on me…and are very empathetic.

    I deliver a fair amount of packages to a woman who lives alone on a farm overlooking a lake. She has gardens and many bird feeders and a real tiny sauna, a few barns and a smile with bright eyes. Her face is unlike most, for scars of a long ago injury or illness took most of it, yet she is always apologetic for the packages I carry. I would bring her the moon…and feel no strain…I don’t make mistakes on her mail, but feel she would be kind if I did.

    There is a talkative positive older woman who paints and is willing to show me her latest picture, she rides an exercise bike, gets her hair done on Tuesdays, for Wednesday is senior lunch day and gives me oranges and cookies…she too would pooh away my mistakes and just put them back in the box…life is too short for grumpiness. She was sick a few weeks ago, and she didn’t like the way sick felt in her…she gave me glowing reports of the kind treatment she received at the Doctors office…she only meets kindness.

    The lonely folks wait for me, idling along; waiting to say a word or two…our conversations have one-day gaps, we learn about each other bit by bit, stretched out over months of daily one minute visits…slowly we are becoming friends.

    I no longer believe there will come a time of no mistakes, nor do I believe I will become friends with folks who are forever looking at me to fail…and perhaps I am making them happy by giving them something to complain about.

    What is so odd is that the ones with a legitimate complaint have spirits of goodwill…and the others find a misfiled letter a cause to complain.

    It is peculiar to ride along the same route day after day, seeing the same people and learning who they are by how they respond to life and life’s mistakes…you can tell a lot about people by how they treat the mail lady.

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  • My mind’s point of view.

    Byron Katie says, “There are no mistakes” and I have to agree. We do that which we do with the knowledge and awareness we have at the time, when we know better or believe differently we do better.

    It isn’t a mistake it is a level of understanding.

    I even looked up the word Mistake and here is the definition,

    An error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness. 2. A misconception or misunderstanding.

    Some how we were taught that mistakes were bad, yet in reality it is a case of deficient knowledge and defective jugement.

    We can only act at the level of understanding, it is impossible to be above your level of knowing, it simply can’t happen.

    Byron Katie’s passion is to question stressful thoughts, to go after the thoughts that make us suffer.

    Mostly I think we suffer believing we are supposed to be where we are not, doing things we didn’t know how to do.

    We are where we are.

    We know what we know.

    And we can’t know what we don’t know.

    And once we know we can’t not know.

    It seems that life is all about being here and agreeing with what you know now, accepting yourself in this moment fully.

    Looking backwards you can see with your new found wisdom the places you missed the mark, but due to your level of understanding in that moment, it makes perfect sense, so no mistake, just the lack of knowing.

    On that dreadful day when I woke up to the fact that all I knew was not all there was to know, I found that I knew much less than there was to know.

    My greatest strength was being able to let go of all I knew to begin to learn about the things I didn’t.

    I simply sat down in the fact that I lived a life at the tip of the iceberg and it was to my own benefit to get to know me. Imagine living as me but knowing me.
    An incredible frightful place to find yourself living as someone you don’t know.

    My first step was to admit to myself I didn’t know me, know where I came from who the people I called family were, I began looking at my life as a stranger would.

    I began from the stance of I know nothing.

    And by doing so was able to be open to everything.

    I had lost confidence in all I knew and had no pre-sets or standards to adhere to, I was standing naked in an open space willing to see reality without my minds concepts.

    Mindless I stood.

    The landscape I then discovered didn’t match my old mind at all.

    We then danced this dance between reality and my old mind, like a game of old maid, trying to see what matched and what did not.

    In the end my mind lost only but 100% of the time.

    As Byron Katie says, reality is God and God is reality.

    I guess we could say the only mistake is believing an unchallenged mind.

    For I challenged my mind against reality, nothing was too sacred for the test, no family member, no title, no past cute deeds, all I dragged into the game of matching mind to reality.

    My mind was so far off the mark, that I began to understand that I fell into reality with a broken mind.

    Or you could say I went out of my mind on that day when I discovered a pedophile instead of a dad.

    And I did.

    My mind had a story that didn’t match reality, a story that I held sacred was an illusion, it couldn’t walk in reality.

    All my love, my life and my way was poured into an illusion that wasn’t even true.

    At 46 I awoke in the middle of a nightmare, in a play where I was the star but it was based upon lies, lies that I called truth. My fantasy world crumbled and a nightmare slid in place.

    Harsh reality boldly took over where my pretend mind stood.

    Yet this reality was actually kind to me, it affirmed my path, it resonated with my body, and it set me free from the mental mind.

    If your mind is not clear and you can’t see reality, you are then living in a foreign land, once removed from reality.

    You can live there for a lifetime and not touch reality.

    I know this seems insane and it is, to be in reality and not know it.

    I lived for 46 years in a mind that was blind to what is.

    Doing things that no one in their right mind would do.
    Saying and believing things that only an insane person would do.

    Yet there are no mistakes in my past.

    My past life was lived from my mind’s point of view.

  • In the Ditches of Life.

    Promises and commitments seem to only have real power when they are used for self, when they are used for others we become their slave.

    I want my daughter’s decision and commitment to be for her self and not for me, for it to be something she feels obligated to do for her own morals and values, leaving me out of the picture.

    If she were to make choices based on what makes me happy, she has just transferred herself over to me for me to rule.

    Promises and commitments when made for another seem on the surface to be a nice and friendly thing, yet if you look closer, they become silk chains that now keep you dancing for their happiness.

    I do not want my children to live a life that has them chained to my happiness, I want their lives to be driven from the inside out, to do what pleases them and makes them happy.

    Defining their own morals and values, owning their responsibility as individuals, being their own character sets them free to make promises to themselves, commitments they want to live by, that leaves us both free.

    My actions can’t define her and hers can’t define me.

    It is the freedom that is both liberating and scary as hell.

    Letting them go to crash and burn or to grow and become strong and independent.

    Kicking them out of the nest in my head, letting them grow and stretch into their own lives.

    I can no longer catch them when they fall; their falls are much bigger. They have to get back up and travel on.

    I think the threads and ties are for the mother’s benefit, I am thinking that our children are much stronger and more resilient than we believe.

    While there is freedom when the silk apron strings are cut, there is fear that did we teach them all they need to know?

    Are they strong enough to fly?

    Life isn’t lived in a straight line without failures; it looks more like a drunkard path.

    We all will fall, and stumble, make a bad judgment call, fall off the path and go in the ditch to gather a morsel of wisdom, it isn’t the mistakes we make but how we pick ourselves back up.

    We are not born with wisdom we find it in the ditches of life.

  • Fashioner

    In a split second, you can go from being a little girl to being a mom. It happens so fast, I am not sure we even have the time to think about it. It happens to some and I believe others missed the portal. But the portals open up each day and in many situations.

    As life moves along, we can have children, but that doesn’t make us a mom. The saying “anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad”, should also be true of mothers. Moms are not a given.

    Little girls do not grow up dreaming of being a bad mom, especially if they have been victims of one. Yet some how the pattern is laid out we follow almost like robots without a choice. Born into a legacy, we either follow or get out. It is in the little seconds, the little moments that we can correct the legacy. It is little by little we become a mom. And if we string enough of the mom moments together, we become more a mom than a mother.

    It takes time, it takes patience, it takes learning, growing, unlearning, undoing. Taking family traditions that have been handed down generation to generation. We are literally trying to turn lifetimes of patterns and bringing in new at the same time. It is best not to think out long and far and to look too long behind you, but instead just be in this moment, with this choice, with this child, on this day, in this hour, facing this minute.

    You are the Fashioner of a new life pattern.

    In this now moment, give space, stop and see, ask and not react, drop the preconceived ideas of the outcome. And here’s a good one, “think before you speak” or in my case stop before you holler! In each split second, you and you alone get to decide which will I be here, the child or the mom.

    I learned I had all I could handle  was just focusing on being a mom. It was a really hard job. They got to be the kids, and I played the mom. I would speak it out loud. “I am the mom, the consequence person, you be you and I will deal.” I literally had to turn myself into a mom. One choice, one minute at time. And I am still not done. I think it takes a lifetime to become a mom.

    The greatest news is that I stepped out alone, daring to walk out of the legacy and into a new place. Here we are free, no rules, no patterns, free space to be. I love not knowing how to do it right! For if this felt comfortable, I would be back in the legacy of my youth. So the more you need to change, the more uncomfortable you will feel, it is a good thing in a bad way!

    It was like throwing the old mom out, and to be truthful, I hated being her too, and now I get to be a new mom. My oldest daughter has said, “it is like getting a new mom without a divorce” and that is literally the truth.

    Most people try and change the outside to correct the inside. That is like asking the child to make you a better mom, and we do it, over and over again.

    Byron Katie says, “There are only three types of business, yours, mine and Gods. If you are in my business, who is in yours?

    Being in my business is a full time job! One I gladly suffer, for I was out this job for a long long time. I am happy to be employed full time. I am elated to just doing me. That is simply all I am responsible for!

    An imperfect mother now and forever, for my past I cannot change, but my future is mine to design. Oh what shall I be?  The what fills me with potential, with hope, for you see, it wasn't that long ago I had no choice.  I am grateful beyond measure to have walked free, to dream the impossible dream. A mom, a loving mom, can it be?  Oh simply just watch me….piece by piece, inch by inch, and one day we will both be surprised how this ends.  It is up to me, I am the Fashioner of my life.

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