Tag: Motivation

Rainy Day Musings

The last several days have been really bipolar in my personal life. Both extremes, swinging wildly to be noticed, as I’ve been wrapping up a couple courses that I’ve been working on in my time off. I’ve been meditating more and noticing there have been some really interesting synchronicities swirling about. I’m moving through some changes and experiencing personal growth, but I look around and see things that may be reminders of something or little signs that I pick up on in the world. Some give me a feeling of reaffirming, like seeing birds in the bird feeder reaffirms that animals are often so much wiser than we are. Oh, and to remember to refill it, as we now have a hungry horde of diverse bird species that come to our birdie buffet. Or seeing 12:34 on the clock everyday, which makes me think I’m on the right path for something. I couldn’t tell you what, since I feel like I’m floating in space most of the time. I also feel like so many of us are “looking for a sign”, that sometimes we just make them up, so we can feel supported or as there is a divine presence of sorts. It makes us feel less alone, I imagine. I’m sure I’m making some of these signs up. That’s my cynical nature shining through. My cautiously optimistic side wants to believe there is something to synchronicities and signs. Maybe I’m just trying to drag myself out of existential dread or perpetual boredom. Who knows?

I’ve been reading a book called Find Your F*ckyeah, by Alexis Rockley (the audio version of course, because I can only read in short bursts these days, due to many interruptions). She describes your F*ckyeah as your “art” or “passion”, not necessarily something you get paid for, but things you’d do without getting paid, or things that you can find your flow in. I love her approach to this book, not claiming to have all the answers, and just being real. I appreciate the honesty. But more than that, I appreciate her saying, sure, I don’t have the answers for you, but I have the way that you can find them yourselves. I don’t want anyone to do anything FOR me, or giving me some “quick fix” solution. I want to have the skills and knowledge to DO IT MYSELF. And maybe that hyper-self reliance is my trauma response to being perpetually disappointed. I’m self aware enough to recognize that I’ve been let down, A LOT. By myself and everyone else. I’d rather be to blame on my own, and figure it out without relying on others, who will then also let me down. Being let down by myself for not meeting an expectation is part of the human experience. Being let down by others can be triggering and cause us to lose faith in humanity or our support systems. It’s all a bad time.

But the question for me is how to find FLOW. Do I do the stuff I’m good at? There’s a handful of things I’m alright at, but most of them are soul numbing and boring as hell. Do I do the things I’m bad at? That sounds like an effort in frustration, since I don’t want to keep doing something I’m bad at to hopefully find joy and flow in it at some later time. Does that make me impatient? Yeah, probably. My brand of neurospicy can only handle so much failure in a day, and doing something I’m not good at in hopes to become better at it, sounds exhausting these days. Unless of course, it’s something I find some sort of joy in, but those things seem to be fewer and fewer. Being an adult is crap. Just continuing to do things that suck, day in and day out, until we come to the end? Why have we done this to ourselves? Alexis suggests making the mundane into a game, to make it less garbage and soul killing.

A couple of things I am pretty good at, that are not completely mind numbing, are writing (which I’m doing right now) and roller skating. There are only a couple roller rinks remaining here, and of course the weather isn’t cooperating for outdoor skating. My hope is to take the kiddo out next week, when the rain is slated to pause, so we can hit the skate park. She can ride her bike or scooter, and I can get in some skate time myself. That’s been the light guiding me out of this weather-induced funk. We’ve had only a few sunny days, and the rest have been torrential rain. Gotta love the Midwest. My goal is to improve my jam (otherwise known as rhythm) skating, since I spent a decade of my life playing roller derby. The jam aspect sort of got lost. I took a couple roller derby practice sessions last year and the game has changed so much, as has the style of play. I retired 10 years ago, so it doesn’t hold the same spark for me. It’s a game and style I don’t particularly recognize, slower paced. It’s a lot less fun to play, and I’m sure it’s not nearly as exciting to watch for spectators. There aren’t the big sweeping hits that send skaters flying into the seats. There aren’t the massive breakaways from the pack, or the harrowing disappointments when someone is sent to the penalty box. The rules themselves have even changed drastically,because this sport is always evolving, as it should. A decade ago, I was pretty good at it. It’s kind of lost the luster now. I love being on skates though, so the skate park will be exciting.

http://egyptsaidso.com/weekly-motivation/if-destiny-is-by-choice-not-chance-then-what-are-you-choosing/

Finding a new hobby seems like the only way to find more flow in life, but what, and how? Alexis talks about how hard it is to find things that we enjoy, that are marginally difficult enough to keep our full attention long enough to find flow, primarily because we are too tired, anxious, or distracted for the trial and error of discovering it. Often we are afraid of failure to the point of “trying new things” paralysis. This keeps many of us from finding our flow, our art, our passions in life. This keeps us on the hamster wheel of productive for productivity sake, and completely out of finding our F*ckyeah. It makes us relatively good employees, and otherwise numb to the injustices in the world. We are passive and tired as hell. I blame many of the issues we are experiencing in our current world (politics, war, famines), on exactly this. How things might be different if we were all finding our flow, and excelling at things we enjoy? It’s a wild thought to entertain, for sure.

My hope for us all is that we find what lights us up, where we can find joy and flow, bringing our whole selves into the light, even if it’s only occasionally. Best wishes in discovering what that is for yourself, finding the time and resources to explore and try and fail in all the things you’ve been afraid to.

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Integration and Announcement

Please follow the link below to read this post on Substack.

https://open.substack.com/pub/ayearoflastinghappiness/p/integration-and-an-announcement?r=qdjak&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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Happy 201 and more

Hello friends.

To say “it’s been a while” would be at minimum, disingenuous. I feel like I should begin more along the lines of “it’s been more than two years since my last confession”. As I sit here drinking my morning coffee on an average Sunday, please understand that I’ve never forgotten about you, nor have I abandoned writing.

It’s been hard, these last two years, to do much of anything outside of survival mode. However, I’ve been taking a class recently on self empowerment, and while digging deep into my core values, writing was quietly waiting for me to pick it back up. Since I recognized this, I’ve gained momentum from starting a collaborative project with my mom. She was visiting us from the other side of the country and we had a finite amount of time to start and made excellent headway. But it felt good to sort of stretch my legs, writing with her, while remembering how much I love this form of communication. I’ve picked up journaling once again, and now, I’m back here.

Writing has been therapeutic in many ways, but also truly difficult. There are a myriad of thoughts, feelings, and unknowns that have prevented me from coming back here, at least with regularity, for more than 5 years. I’ve existed, but struggled to live fully, due to unprocessed or buried traumas. I’ve barely scratched the surface of sorting through all that, but I’m also done feeling stuck. Life has thrown some wild pitches, and I keep swinging for the fence. I’m just not connecting with the ball and I’m not going to chase after it.

Since the closure of my business, separation and divorce from my second husband, I’ve moved across the country, moved houses several times, endured a lengthy and languishing pandemic and the after affects thereof, witnessed widespread protesting and violence against police brutality, against our own nation’s capital, against wars and genocide, against each other for our views, faiths, and political leanings. I’ve also had opportunities to learn and grow, become closer with my family, get married and buy a home with my husband, discover unknown depths of my capacity to love, support and cherish moments with my kids (bio and step), explore new communities and meet people who will be lifelong friends, drive long, introspective distances, and survive moments I genuinely believed would have been my last. A whole lot has happened in a little over 5 years.

We’ve all been collectively living through unprecedented times. We’ve all been dragging our asses through history in the making. It’s been real wild, and I think as much as our kids have struggled and lost during all of this, the adults carrying this weight have suffered greatly more than we realize. We are carrying the traumas of our own experiences and that of our kids (even if they’re not biologically yours, most of us have young ones in our lives).

All of this is to recap why I’ve been a ghost. I haven’t felt like I had something meaningful to contribute to the narrative, since there’s been so much fucking noise surrounding us. I’m simply trying to survive myself, with a swirling inside my brain hole. It’s been like a blender in there. Now, it’s a shit smoothie and I’m ready to pour it out. Strap in, kids. I am planning great things and will be back soon, and more regularly. I’m motivated and falling back in love with words, after being estranged for so very long.

Please subscribe if you’re interested in keeping up because I’ll be making some announcements in the coming weeks/months. Thank you for reading and I’ll catch you on the flip side (if you’re young, you probably don’t know that reference- look it up). Finally, this is my 201st post to the page. 🎉

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Right Actions- A Thought

As a Buddhist, we generally strive to follow the eight-fold noble path. Right Action is one of those folds. However, the word “right” in all of the eight folds is quite subjective and often difficult to really qualify.

For instance, fighting in a situation may very well be the right thing for a person to do in the moment, for fear of real danger. However, it may not be “legal”, which inherently isn’t “right” in the eyes of our judicial system. Besides the judgements, is that action still morally right? I’ve recognized that frequently, “moral” and “legal” are not aligned.

In the words of the great Stan Lee- every villain is the hero of their own story.

Fear and morality are parts of Right Action, in that, our morals and our fear reflexes very much shape our worlds as individuals, and our experiences in the world at large. It’s suffice to say, that absent these guides, people would also behave very differently, I believe.

For example: if we were not afraid of consequences, I feel there’d be many more instances of people making unhelpful or unwholesome choices in their lives. If many of us did not have clearly defined morals (whether spiritually based or not), we’d have a much more aggressive and violent world. That’s not to say “moral” people don’t do counterproductive and/or harmful things. Because they often do, largely from some semblance of moral superiority or self righteousness. I just think that we’d all be worse off, without morals and fear guiding the general populace.

I know that the question: who’s to say what’s “right”, is obviously unanswerable in general, but it does bear reflection. What is right for me isn’t going to be what’s right for someone else in all situations. The causes and conditions, as well as histories of each of us often make these choices very different for an individual. What’s greater still, is having to justify that choice to others.

I try to avoid calling things good or bad, as that comes from a place of judgement, and rarely am I qualified to lay down such a determination for people other than myself. I can certainly look back on my life and Cherry-pick the items I’ve decided from the future that are both good and bad. But even this type of reflection is not helpful. I’ve decided that something that IS helpful, at least for me is to look back on those situations as “I did the best I could with what I had”. I also view other people’s actions in this frame as often as possible, because it allows room for empathy, grace, and humility for myself and those around me. It makes me feel less beat up about my own choices, since life does that enough for me, without me beating myself up for bonehead decisions. I’ve made PLENTY of really dumb choices. However, I was doing what I thought was right (most of the time) in that moment, given the causes, conditions, and where I was on my journey.

Recently, I’ve been struggling with this whole concept of Right Action and also extending grace and empathy to others. Part of that is anger and another part is moral judgement. It’s really challenging to view someone as “doing the best they can” when they’re simply being assholes, because they can in a situation. I do genuinely believe that some people are mot operating from “their best”, but rather “control”, which is a hard place to land. It makes a hard pill harder to swallow. I want to believe that there is good in others and that they’re doing their best. Yet, they’re not showing their best selves and being hurtful, hateful, spiteful, and/or malicious on purpose, to inflict pain. This is not a world I want to live in. This isn’t a life I wish on anyone.

The problem is that I want to help, to the point of exhaustion. I want the world to be kind and gentle, just and equal. It simply isn’t. Part of this, I think is my own karmic lesson. Since I am a helper and a fixer, I get very much involved in things that I think I can be of service to. Then, I feel responsible and defeated when things aren’t as I feel they should be, or the outcome isn’t what my sense of justice desires. This is certainly something that I’ve been working on for many years and will likely continue to navigate. I have a distinct view of what is or is not justice, and when things fall outside those clearly defined spaces, I feel unbalanced and that the world is all wrong. For me, it is. I am a very grounded and definite person. The world doesn’t have to bend to me or my sense of morality, and frequently does the opposite. I’ve acknowledged this about myself, and hope someday to just let things go the way they will. Until then… I’m going to be trapped in this cage of righteousness and morality that I’ve constructed for myself. And that, my friends, is not only frustrating, but also the very definition of self-inflicted suffering. However, all I can do with certainty, is continue to operate from a place where I feel I’m doing the right thing, given the causes and conditions around me. It’s all any of us can do.

Until next time…

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Evolution

Hello and welcome back to whatever this blog has morphed into… musings really, I think. I set out over a decade ago after becoming inspired by a book I read on happiness. I gave myself tasks and goals (very Type A of me) to achieve everyday happiness. And for a long time, it worked, as you can read if so inclined, by my studious documentation of that project.

Over time, that little project changed a little, into sort of another project. And that challenge lead into a different thing, which led to a bizarre “confessional” of sorts, and now to this phase… where I seemingly wax poetic about something that has been on my mind.

As I have aged over the years, my focuses have changed too. My voice in writing, as well as my priorities in my life have changed distinctly. In the time that I’ve been hosting this blog, I’ve become a parent, gotten divorced and remarried (possibly more than once), and I’ve moved more times than I can recall at this moment. I’ve fairly recently uprooted my life and took my kiddo across the country to try something else, because what I was doing in our hometown simply wasn’t working for us anymore. We’ve grown as individuals and as a pair, me and the kid. We’ve gained a whole new support system in our new/old city, and lost a tremendous amount in these subsequent, turbulent years.

Which brings me to today’s topic: evolution. Not the controversial (for reasons I cannot begin to fathom) Evolution (read: dinosaurs, primates, humans, planet, and cosmos shit), but evolution, as we grow and change as people, parents, partners, and stewards of our lives. While I jokingly say to those close to me, I’ve been the same cynical bitch you’ve all come to know and love, that’s not exactly true. Yes, a great deal of my personality has not changed one bit since childhood- shakes fist at trauma– there are huge parts of me that HAVE evolved into someone/something else.

I’ve recognized that events in my life have caused me to change, both as a person unto myself and as a person in the world. Past experiences have formed how I behave in certain situations, whether healthy or unhealthy. A number of them are trauma responses that I’ve picked up to carve the path of least resistance for myself or others. However some of this stuff just comes with age, and my priorities being different than they were when I was 30.

My relationships with people have changed significantly too. My close friends and I aren’t playing sports like we used to, injuries and having jobs that start early in the mornings being things. Partnerships have evolved. The days of teenage infatuation have moved toward a deep sense of knowing another person on a deeper level. I’m not as afraid of things in relationships either, like the other person getting distracted or periods away from one another.

I recently saw one of my best friends and it was like nothing had changed. We caught up, laughed, hugged… we’ve not seen each other in 6 months. We don’t talk as often as we’d like, but it’s ok. Life is hectic and we are so solid in our friendship, we know that we are friends for life. There’s so much peace in knowing who your people are and that they’re solid. It’s taken a loooooong time, and a whole lot of shitty friends seeing themselves out of my life for this to happen. I used to be the type of person that would try to keep people in my life, even if they were toxic, because I was afraid of being alone. I don’t have the patience for that any longer. It’s just not who I am.

Patience is another thing that has evolved. I have infinitely more patience for certain things, like kids. But I’ll be damned if I waste a single second that doesn’t serve me or my higher self. If it’s a drain, I’m OUT. This goes for people, social situations, jobs, all of it. I can’t tolerate nonsense anymore. If Covid has taught me anything, it’s that life is too short for bullshit and I refuse to waste a single moment more on it. I’ve wasted far too much of my life catering to people and things that are soul sucking. Never again.

This admission in itself, is proof positive that I’ve evolved. In a former life, I’d have held on for dear life to shit that was actively destroying me. I lost everything because it, repeatedly. I lost myself. I lost my homes, car, stability, security, everything. I was empty and lost. Never again.

I can say with utmost certainty that it’s never too late to evolve, change, grow, and throw away the things that make you feel hollow, alone, or sad. Choose happy and work toward that every single day.

Thanks for reading.

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