Tag: today

• Be a Surprise

  "I know that over the years, through fear and expectation, my mind has gathered and hoarded places I needed to go, things I needed to have, selves I needed to be.  But here I am, without most of them – the goals and wants all used up in learning how to love."

  "So, try as I do to imagine and construct where I am headed, try as I will to plan and know what this life of feeling means, it is the pulse of what I feel itself that lifts me into spirit.  In truth, wings don't grow any differently to fit south or east or west, and our lives,  no matter how we train ourselves are more fundamental than any direction of worldly ambition.  We, like birds, are meant to fly and sing – that's all – and all our plans and schemes are twigs of nest that, once outgrown we leave."  Mark Nepo

  What I took away from today's reading, is that no matter what we think we need to be doing or where we think we should be, all we can do is live where we are right now and do so fully being with what is.

  It matters not if you have goals or destinations, in order to get there you live.

  You live whether you have lofty goals or not, whether you have intelligent wants, or righteous destinations.  You live.  

  For me the more I concentrated on goals or end games, the less I lived right now, for I was living for a certain outcome. Bypassing this day, focusing on the one over there.

  Now I just live and an outcome happens.  Often times a surprise destination appears.

  It seems rather careless in a world that wants you to keep in mind your destination and to groom your life to assure you end up where you planned on going…to NOT plan, but live.

  In my past, this moment in time was just something to overlook, for my mind was focused on the goal….tomorrow, when, and If.

  When you live staring at the horizon, you miss what is right here, right now.

  The sights, the smells, the sounds, the people…all the opportunities to be alive and engaged in living.

  It truly doesn't matter where we end up, for there are so many days and hours to live before we get there.  Some how we feel that  when we get there life will begin, when in actuality, living in this day is to live.

  Living in this day has to matter more than any lofty goal in mind.

  If you can't fully live this day, you are wasting days waiting for the goal to appear.

  We somehow have been sold a bill of goods called, goals, dreams etc…that steal our attention from living today.

  Maybe it is when your future starts to shrink, that you can see how fruitless it was.  

  What good is a goal if all the days leading up to it your not living, but counting the days till you arrive.  Imagine all the days spent and passed by, giving up for this goal.  It is like the goal has stolen your everyday life.

  Living without staring at goals or focusing on a certain outcome, will allow you to live and breathe better in this day.

  Imagine how you could live today, IF it didn't have to be a step towards a goal.

  You could be careless and things wouldn't matter if they fit into the 'plan'.

  You could be a live living work of art…where you truly don't know how you will end up when you get 'there'.  Live without a firmly painted goal or pictured outcome.

  Live… allowing the ending to be a surprise.  

   

   

   

   

  March 23, 2012

  goal less, life, Mark, Nepo, Surprise, today

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• Find Their Own Way…

  The battle of the wills end when you allow the other to have free will, it is pretty hard to fight with freedom.

  The tighter you hold and the more you force, the less the other person can feel and find their own sense of what it is they want to do.

  When I was in the beginning stages of my mental breakdown, my husband and I found a place to stand that left us both in total freedom, a place called “I love you today.”

  In this spot, it allowed each of us to change our minds and to gauge our own feelings about whether we wanted to stay together. This free space to be yourself, to feel that which you feel and to express it daily allowed us the time to re-configure a new normal in our relationship.

  We fell into this spot after weeks and months of feeling the instability each of us had during the most stressful event in our marriage, Me not knowing who I was.

  Pretty hard to promise tomorrow, when today is unknown.

  It felt so much easier to breathe when we embraced the unknown and lived presently with each day and even each moment.

  “I love you today” is an honest and alive relationship and we both promised the other that if and when we didn’t want to be here we would tell the other.

  It isn’t a piece of paper, the ‘happiness’ of our children, or a million other reasons that folks stay together, but instead we individually get to choose if we fit together, if we are happy here, if we enjoy this place, if we are at peace here, if it is a spot for us to grow and change….

  It is like a free-range relationship, where each has the freedom to be who we are, and when who we are no longer works together, we will be brave enough and honest enough to let the other know.

  I just don’t feel then, that we can blame the other; we will always hold the power within us.

  I love you today, and if it changes I will let you know.

  I am thinking this same idea can be used upon our children. Instead of raising children who must remain in our pen (religion, mind set, pathway, etc), where we tell them how to be and grow, that we instead open the gate and let them roam free.

  Let their will be done.

  Let them decide which way to go and how to be.

  It releases both of us to be who it is we were meant to be.

  This reminds me of the paragraph from one of Bryon Katie’s books,

  “I don’t know what is best for me, or you, or the world. I don’t try to impose my will on you or anyone else. I don’t want to change you or improve you of convert you or help you or heal you. I just welcome things as they come and go. That’s true love. The best way of leading people is to let them find their own way.”

  February 11, 2011

  allowing, based, be, byron, changes, changing, children, differences, forcing, free, freedom, growing, individiual, katie, life, love, on, parents, quotes, relationships, releases, today, will, you

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• Future Us!

  Here is a great concept that I had never considered in a book called, “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert.

   

  “We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat In The Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the Twinkie we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something – a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger, we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, a minute, or a decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.

   

  Yeah, Yeah.  Don’t hold your breath.  Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could have been so stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.  Even that person who takes a bite of the Twinkie we purchased a few minutes earlier may make a sour face and accuse us of having bought the wrong snack.  No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell were we thinking.  They may recognize our good intentions and begrudgingly acknowledge that we did the best we could, but they will inevitably whine to their therapists about how our best just wasn’t good enough for them.

   

  How can this happen?  Shouldn’t we know that tastes, preferences, needs and desires of the people we will be next year – or at least later this afternoon?  Shouldn’t we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives – to find careers and lovers whom they will cherish, to buy slip covers for the sofa that they will treasure for years to come?  So why do they end up with attics and lives that are full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that they consider painful, embarrassing or useless?  Why do they criticize our choice of romantic partners, second-guess our strategies for professional advancement, and pay good money to remove tattoos that we paid good money to get?  Why do they experience regret and relief when they think about us, rather than pride and appreciation?  We might understand all of this if we had neglected them, ignored them, mistreated them in some fundamental way – but damn it, we gave them the best years of our lives!  How can they be disappointed when we accomplished our coveted goals, and why are they so damned giddy when they end up in precisely the spot we worked so hard to steer them clear of?  Is something wrong with them? 

  Or is something wrong with us?”  Daniel Gilbert

   

  I love this concept that we are making choices today so that the US of our future will be happy, when we can’t possible know that the US in the future will be like, want, need or anything!  And we work harder to please the US we don’t know than we do on please the US of today!

   

  I say do today what you love.

  Do it each day for the rest of your life and give up on the future US. 

   

   

  May 18, 2010

  choices, Daniel Gilbert, future, Stumbling on Happiness, today

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• One of a Kind Piece of Life.

  ”At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

   

  Imagine there will never ever be another one of us, ever, who traveled as we traveled, done as we’ve done, lived as we’ve lived, expressed themselves as we have, it is up to us to do ourselves well, for no one is coming behind us to do us better.

   

  This is our only opportunity to be ourselves, this is it, as the saying goes, ‘Life is not a dress rehearsal’.

   

  We don’t get the chance to practice this day, we get one chance to live this day, to express, experience, to feel, to be to engaged in this day, this moment with whom ever it is that happens upon our stage, this is the real deal, right now, we don’t get another chance to live today. 

   

  There is no re-do or do over.  It passes and is forever gone.

   

  We are a one of a kind being living this one day, neither to be repeated ever again. So do it your way, for you are the only one being you!

   

  We are living life without a delete or backspace, once we do it, it is done, so take a pause and put down in your life what it is you want, and make it an expression of you.

   

  Adding the flavor of you wherever you go and leaving a trail, a wisp of you behind.

   

  Like a fragrance from a flower, the scent of spring, or the incredible colors of a sunset, we too carry our own personal one of kind imprint.

   

  Just as fingerprints are unique so are me prints, a one of a kind piece of life!

   

  
  

   

   

   

  April 8, 2010

  be yourself, life, no pattern, self-expression, today, unique

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