Category: January/ February

Love is a choice

Life, like love, is messy and complicated, difficult and flat out hard. We want it to be fun and exciting, but things bog us down, make us heavy. The trick to love, is to fight through that hard and find the things that are beautiful.

There have been times where I’m at my heaviest, and I see something so simple, a glimmer in time, and it makes me feel weightless for just a moment. It’s the breadcrumb that keeps me going. The trail leading me to the next bend in the pathway.

My life has been particularly heavy as of late, and it’s got no chance of lifting in the near future. I’ve been seething with anger at people who could have chosen love. I’ve been shattered by words and deeds, crushed by apathy and indifference. Everything has been flipped upside down.

However, just like love, hate is a choice. I can choose to be angry, sad, and destructive toward myself and others. But what good would come of it? My child would see a mother who is consumed by loathing and frustration. A mother set on destruction- destroying the ones who hurt her, and all the bonds for both sides.

I choose love. Through the fear and anger, the betrayal and malice. I choose love. Letting the anger consume me isn’t doing anyone any favors, especially my kid. I need to be a whole person, one who models the life I want to teach. I need to find the grace in what is otherwise a heartbreaking situation. For me, for my daughter.

Am I still hurt? Sure. Pissed off? Yup. But am I going to waste another moment of my life hating someone? Nobody got time for for that.

Ironically, the year of forced growth has put some important things into perspective for me. The last several years have been a bizarre re-enactment of a previous chapter in my life, but instead of playing the “me” role, I’m the other person. I see now, with glaring clarity what I did to completely derail and sabotage my own life back then. It’s taken much longer than I’d like to admit for me to come to that conclusion, but I got here.

Not only do I now recognize my shortcomings in great detail, but I perfectly understand how they felt during that time. I’ve been beating myself up for more than a decade, because I didn’t completely understand both sides of the equation. But here we are. Lesson learned. Because life is messy and complicated, it couldn’t be quite so easy to extricate from as the first time, since, it took me so fucking long to learn it. However, I’m here now in the right place. It feels terrible in every way. Lesson learned. And through it all, I choose love. It’s all I’ve got left.

Thanks for reading.

Photo credit: wordporn

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Forced Growth

Recently I was reading about what’s in store for 2019, according to astrologers. Apparently, it’s not going to be “my year”, but rather a year of forced growth. When I read this, I laughed.

For many years I’ve said that the Universe, when you’re too thick skulled to learn certain lessons, despite repeated “opportunities” to learn, will in fact force your hand. The Universe is funny like that. You only get so many tries before it’s like, “ok, dummy, we are doing this my way”. I’m notoriously thick skulled sometimes.

I want to think the best of people. I want to think we are all on the same team, that our goals align, and that nobody is selfish. However, repeatedly, I’m proven wrong and forced to reevaluate. When I don’t figure out the lesson after GLARING examples, the Universe forces my hand. Forced. Growth.

I was searching the internet yesterday for a photo to use on this, and another blog. I knew that I wanted a lotus. Nothing says “forced growth” better than a flower that cannot grow, but from the murky waters below. No mud, no lotus.

Pretty much all plants are amazing in this way. They’re buried underground, and from the dirt, beauty and abundance take form. They face uncertainty, predators, adverse growing conditions, flooding, drought… everything should be against these tiny seeds, and yet, many of them survive and thrive. There are boat loads of casualties, but the standard is growth.

Nature WANTS plants to make it. So does the Universe. Just as in nature, the Universe WANTS us to be fruitful. Just as seeds, we are hardwired for survival.

So what lessons am I being forced to learn this year? Notafreakingclue. But I can say for sure, that if this year is anything like the last, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Truthfully, I’m still licking my wounds from 2018. The sting is still very real. But this train is full steam ahead. There’s no stopping it. How many metaphors can I mix? The world may never know.

It’s hard to grow. They say adversity “builds character”, but I’m kind of over this “build, burn, rebuild” cycle. I just want things to be easy for a change. Smooth. But as I keep trying to assure myself, the best is yet to come. However, the realist in me knows, as the Buddha described “life is suffering”. So to be without suffering, we are without life.

Thanks for reading.

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No more answers, only more questions

A friend asked me the other day how long it’s been since I’ve written anything. I casually tell her I write copy for social media posts and 100 million emails all the time. She gently laughed and asked when I wrote for myself.

Obviously, if you’re a reader of this blog, you know that answer. I’ve not been writing for myself, if we can even call it that, for more than a year. What happened, you say? I started a business, quit my day job, moved, and so many more things. But why haven’t I written, through all of those things? I don’t know. Anxiety and stress and depression can be shitty sometimes, I guess. Life gets hard, and it’s harder to post to a blog called A Year of Lasting Happiness, when you feel like pitching yourself off a bridge.

But it’s not without saying, that I miss it. I miss these moments of outpouring: my thoughts and feels on a page. I don’t “have time”… read: I don’t MAKE time. I don’t make the time to put words to page when I feel like a mess. And life, it’s been messy, and complicated, and simply… hard.

There’s been these moments, breadcrumbs I call them, that keep me going. That keep me fighting the good fight. It’s been too long without writing, and the longer I wait, the harder it is to do the thing, and the easier it gets to put off the feeling of longing in my chest, for the words.

The words, you say? Yes. The words. Words, words, words. Those things floating around my head like leaves on a pond. Barely touching the surface, but still connecting. Sometimes my brain swallows up the words, and other times, they’re bursting out my mouth, rapid fire, like a machine gun. I speak so fast sometimes I have to repeat myself, because the listener didn’t even catch them all.

Catching. Them. All.

I have more questions now, than answers. Like, what have I done, and for crying out loud, WHY. But the answers escape me like a child chasing a feather. I reach- wind catches it- floats away gracefully on a breeze.

It’s funny, this life. And by funny, I mean, I don’t know. This seems like the perfect place to say something coy, like, “life is what happens when you’re waiting for life to happen” or some such thing. But, all I can say with certainty is that life is funny. So hard, but equally funny.

I heard on a recent podcast that drinking to take the edge off, takes off the edges at both ends. It took me a few days of kicking that around my head, but it resonated for some reason. I don’t think me having a beer or whatever, after a long or particularly difficult day is “taking my edges off”, but rather, the burdens of daily life have worn my edges smooth, like a rock in a mighty river. This is what happens as we age. All our edges, worn smooth by the hands of time, and gently molding us into everyone else. Slowly eroding our jagged parts, the parts that have seen some shit. The parts that are unique. Revealing nothing but supple roundness, eventually, slowly, wearing us away into oblivion. In a way, that’s a tragic end for the rock. But it happens so slowly, that nobody really even notices, the rock just gradually shrinks into nothingness.

I don’t want to shrink into nothingness. I want to be jagged sometimes, to be sharp. Fierce. But who has the energy? Who isn’t a sack of exhaustion anymore? With jobs, partners, children, parents, houses, cars, any manner of obligations. Who has the time to be SHARP? Who has the energy to be JAGGED?

There’s a Japanese saying “The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down”. It’s basically a lesson in homogenous conformity, which is why their society is so uniform, in a way. But this is also from the culture where it’s totally acceptable to sleep under your desk at work overnight, to work 90 hours a week, and sadly, to work oneself literally to death. Are these people the rocks getting worn down?

There are other homogenous societies that value LESS working, but are somehow “just” as productive. The entirety of Scandinavia is the hallmark of how awesome it can be to live in a relatively wealthy country, with socialized medicine, that also values chilling. They get something like a month or more PAID vacation. I’ve not been on vacation in years. Even before I quit my job, I still didn’t get much, if any, paid time off. It’s crazy.

I still have more questions, than answers. I don’t feel any closer to finding what’s real, besides the fact I have to get up and do it all over again tomorrow, and the next day. And also my capacity to love a small human more than anything else on this planet.

My wish for 2019 is that I can set the groundwork for more balance. I need to stop juggling everydamnthing, while carrying the weight of the world on my back. That started today. We’ve made tough choices, but it will give me something closer to a life, in this life.

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Social media unrest

I’ve been sort of back on fb just over a week now. It’s exactly the same as I left it. The same bullshit politics and tragedies. The same people lamenting or embracing where they are in life. The same pictures of food, memes of animals, and photos of stupid people being themselves. 

Several people I know have recently taken breaks from not just social media, but all media and even become reclusive. Because of the terrible things, the bullshit politics, and the really awful things being spread, they simply had to take a break. These individuals are some of the strongest people I’ve ever known. That’s how you know the environment is toxic. When the people who can withstand the most get out, you know it’s beyond time. 

Social media has been an exceptional tool in our modern world. It’s successfully brought closer the furthest corners of the world. But at what cost? Are we truly to believe that spreading vitriol, trolling, cyber bullying, and hate crimes online are what these tools were meant to be used for? I certainly can’t imagine the creators could have even considered to what lengths human beings will go to hurt others, even in virtual spaces. It’s almost easier in these arenas because there’s an element of anonymity. 

While I’m absolutely not the first person to posit these questions or make the ties between hate and being anonymous, I am discovering the true nature of things for myself. I can’t say I’m a fan of what I see. It’s actually really sad. Moreover, it’s frightening that so many people are misinformed (probably myself too) and spreading hate and lies. It seriously makes me wonder if it’s worth it. 

My husband has gone about a week after removing all his friends from his friends list. He only still has his account because a couple of the groups he’s part of are really important to him. A couple car groups, an insect group, and a plant group- all of which he uses to ask questions about things that matter. The insect group is for our garden, and the plant group was for him to figure out what ‘weeds’ we had in our backyard. Both have proven quite helpful. 

But isn’t this what social media was designed for? Sharing information with people sometimes a half a world away? It seems like we’ve come a long way from that aspect. I’m hopeful that we can get back there before it’s really too late. 

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The overwhelming reality

So I was looking at my blog and realized this quasi-fledgling endeavor of mine has become part of what I refer to ‘Internet overwhelm’. Everyone knows that the internet is FILLED TO THE BRIM with more information, opinion, and the unknown than any one human could ever consume in an entire lifetime. Even people who are readers or people who stumble upon this particular blog, seem to be suffering from information fatigue.

This concept ties directly in with the recent posts over here about Facebook in particular, but social media generally. In a way, I’d consider blogs as social media. What I find most intersting though is that blogging seems to be less two-way interaction than other forms of social media. Of course there’s a comment section, which I encourage readers to make use of, it’s less immediate and public as posts to social media.

There’s this feeling as if between our personal lives and the atmosphere in the world, many forms of sharing just become part of the larger backdrop, and very little stands out anymore.  It all just becomes the hum around us.

After my break from social media, these nuances are becoming more clear and I’m categorically less interested in participating. Strangely and surprisingly, my husband who is an intense social media user, all but deleted his fb account today. He wants to keep in touch with a couple people and maintain his presence in a couple of niche groups, so he didn’t delete it completely. But he removed all of his friends, with three exceptions, myself being one of them.

He sent the friends he wants to maintain messages containing his email and phone number, but then promptly deleted them and moved on. I’m proud of him. I doubt I’ll go to that extent, but I have already found myself frustrated and annoyed with the state of these things.

What about you, the readers? Care to weigh in on your opinions?

Thanks for reading!

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