
WITH THESE THREE, YOU GET A GOLD STAR
Life moves so fast that, before we know it, we’ve stacked up a bunch of years trailing off behind us. One of my core beliefs is that I came into this world with a set of lessons to learn, and if I don’t learn them in this life, I just might have to learn them in a subsequent life. Whether that be fact or fiction, I don’t know. However, it behooves me to live my life as if it is. It makes my life better and I believe it makes life better for those with whom I come in contact.
The three sections below will be the basic measurements I use to guide me.
SHOW UP
Make it a point, every day, to show up. To be present–regardless of how good the bed feels. Climb out of it, pour a cup of coffee or water, or soda, or juice and take a look outside and even step outside if you can. Celebrate the new day. Notice the sunrise, the trees. Listen to the birds singing their welcome of the morning. I make it a habit every morning when I walk out of my bedroom, to raise my arms over my head and say “Good morning, world! You look beautiful today!”
Try it.
What do you see, smell, hear, feel, taste? Fill your lungs and give thanks for a new day. It is about not wasting time and energy with thoughts of what might happen, could happen, probably won’t happen, or what I wish would happen.
In other words, showing up means to live in the present moment. Connect with family and friends, listen, really listen to what they say and what they don’t say, what their actions tell you. Hear them. Understand them, or at least let them know you want to understand them. And if you don’t understand them, ask them to help you do so.
Listen to your own inner voice. What is it that I need to say today to be authentic? Be totally honest with yourself and appreciate all you are.
Recognize and accept that we each possess both a light and a dark side. Allow the light of day to shine on the dark in order to diffuse its power over you.
It includes allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, to take risks, to know what our passion is and be willing to step out and take a risk to achieve it. To take risks for our heart’s desire by letting go of one trapeze in order to clasp the other.
Being present also means to put away phoniness. To not ‘act happy’ when we feel lower than dirt. To address why we’re not happy.
Showing up is not about me proving to you I am a good (or bad) person. Showing up is about listening to my own sense of wisdom and aligning my behavior toward self and others, accordingly.
What does “showing up” to life mean to you? What parts of that do you find difficult to follow? What parts are easier? Feel free to comment in the space below.
PAY ATTENTION
Pay attention, to what, you ask.
Pay attention to everything.
Learn how to tune into life and the world around you—the seen and the unseen. There is so much more to this world, and to those who people it, than we realize.
Pay attention to the weary-looking clerk checking your groceries. Strike up a conversation with her or him by asking how their day has been. If she’s tired, how many hours she’s worked that day. Find something on which to compliment them.
Pay attention to how their eyes light up and their back straightens.
Smile and greet a strange. Strike up a friendly conversation and enjoy their presence.
Pay attention to the tress blowing in the breeze, or the layer of frost on the ground. Walk outside at night and look up at the moon and SMILE.
Notice if someone looks like they need help, and offer it.
Pay attention when that still small voice says, “Slow down, don’t drive so fast.”
Or, let someone get ahead of you in line?
Pay attention to your significant other. Hear what they say and make sure you understand it correctly. Every single, solitary day tell someone you love them.
Pay attention to your own needs and the difference in how you feel when you take proper care of your body.
In other words, wake up to the world. Participate in it. Interact with others. Give of yourself. Care about each other and care about our planet.
STAY UNATTACHED TO THE OUTCOME
I can hear you now. Woman, are you crazy? How in the world can I not care about the outcome of something I want so badly? You MUST be crazy.
Often, we, in our infinite wisdom, think we have a monopoly on the truth, and if everyone would just agree with us, go to the same church, swear by the same social guidelines, preach the same message, be of the same opinion, then this world would be a better place.
If they don’t, then we need to work harder to make that happen. Coerce, argue, try to convince, demand, beg, plead, cajole, twist facts, show statistics, or, when all else fails, cry or faint.
This also holds true when we work so hard to try to make some event happen. Get a book published, make a certain guy like us, get a certain job offer, win the lottery, win a contest, get a part in a play, on and on and on, you fill in the blank.
A better rule to live by is to do the best we can to accomplish our goal, and then trust the outcome without trying to force something to happen. That reminds me of the old song that goes If love don’t come easy, you have to let it go.
A wise friend once told me I always tried to push the river. That I thought I knew how things should work out and tried to insure that happened. In other words, I stood out in the middle of the Rio Grande and demanded that it flow north, rather than south. And if it didn’t, I worked harder to make that happen.
That same person taught me how to sit and watch the river flow, and how, at times a branch might get stuck along the bank, but in time, the flowing water moves it along, back into the mainstream.
This is uncomfortable to many, including me, for I suppose we all have our control issues. How about you? Do you attempt to push the river in the direction you think it should go? Then that is “attachment to the outcome.”
Instead, learn to trust the process. And trust that the outcome is for your highest good, even if it doesn’t make sense at the time.
.
There are no mistakes, just lessons.
Personal growth is trial and error.
As long as we live, lessons will present themselves to us to learn.
Now, if that’s not the most discouraging lesson of all. After all the work I’ve done on myself all these years, one would think I’d learned all my lessons and could coast till the end.
Not so. Very few of us receive the truth complete, unabridged and sight blinding, because of instantaneous illumination. We learn it one tiny step at the time. Sometimes, even when we’ve learned it, we find ourselves learning the same lesson all over again, but in an even deeper way.
The experiments you try and fail at, are just as much a part of the lessons as those experiments in which you succeed.
I think we are too hard on ourselves. We make a mistake and we beat up on our self, shaming, putting down, and telling ourselves we are awful.
Since we attract the lessons we need to learn, every time we attract the same lesson, we are reminded we haven’t learned that one yet. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a part of the whole life-lesson process. We learn from it what we can and move on, not brow beating, but reminding ourselves we’re further down the road to becoming the person we choose to be. We may have to repeat that mistake, but eventually we will get there.
I work at learning to accept myself, even with all my warts and moles. When I screw up, I remind myself the whole world is not going to shun me and think I am a terrible person. That I can still love me, hold my head up, make a correction in my path, and keep going.
How about you? How do you handle it when you make mistakes?
One of my core beliefs is that I came into this world with a set of lessons to learn, and if I don’t, I just might have to learn them in a subsequent life. Whether that be fact or fiction, I don’t know. However, it behooves me to live my life as if it is. It makes my life better and I believe it makes life better for those with whom I come in contact. This post, and the next three, will be the basic measurements I use to guide me in doing so.
SHOW UP
Make it a point, every day, to show up–be present–regardless of how good the bed feels. Climb out of bed, pour a cup of coffee or water, or soda, or juice and take a look outside and even step outside if you can. Celebrate the new day. Notice the sunrise, the trees. Listen to the birds singing their welcome of the morning. What do you see, smell, hear, feel, taste? Fill your lungs and give thanks for a new day. It is about not wasting my time and energy with thoughts of what might happen, could happen, probably won’t happen, or what I wish would happen.
In other words, showing up means to live in the present moment.
Connect with family and friends, listen, really listen to what they say and what they don’t say, what their actions tell you. Hear them. Understand them, or at least let them know you want to understand them. And if you don’t understand them, ask them to help you do so.
Listen to your own inner voice. What is it that I need to say today to be authentic. Be totally honest with yourself and appreciate all you are.
Recognize and accept that we each have both a light and a dark side. Allow the light of day to shine on the dark in order to diffuse its power over yourself. (We’ll talk more about this in the future.)
It includes allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, to take risks, to know what our passion is and be willing to step out and take a risk to achieve it.
To take risks for our heart’s desire by letting go of one trapeze in order to clasp the other.
Being present also means to put phoniness aside. To not ‘act happy’ when we feel lower than dirt. To address why we’re not happy.
Showing up is not about me proving to you I am a good (or bad) person. Showing up is about listening to my own sense of wisdom and aligning my behavior toward self and others, accordingly.
What does showing up to life mean to you? What parts of that do you find difficult to follow? What parts are easier? Feel free to comment.
There are no mistakes, just lessons.
Personal growth is trial and error.
The experiments you try and fail at, are just as much a part of the lessons as those experiments in which you succeed.
I think we are too hard on ourselves. We make a mistake and we beat up on our self, we shame, put down, tell ourselves we are awful.
Since we attract the lessons we need to learn, every time we attract the same lesson, we are reminded we haven’t learned that one yet. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a part of the whole life-lesson process. We learn from it what we can and move on, not brow beating, but reminding ourselves we’re further down the road to becoming the person we choose to be. We may have to repeat that mistake, but eventually we will get there.
I work at learning to accept myself, even with all my warts and moles. When I screw up, I remind myself the whole world is not going to shun me and think I am a terrible person. That I can still love me, hold my head up, make a correction in my path, and keep going.
How about you? How do you handle it when you make mistakes
WE COME INTO THIS WORLD TO LEARN LIFE’S LESSONS
The lessons you come into this world to learn will present themselves to you over and over again until you learn them. Once you have, then you will continue to the next lesson.
We are back to one of my favorite words: BEHOOVE. I am no authority on how we might come into this world with a set of lessons to learn, or even if we do. But I do know when I CHOOSE to believe that we do, and practice learning those lessons the first, second, or third time around, my life is so much easier. Therefore, it behooves me to learn each lesson and be done with it.
How do we know when we’ve learned one of those lessons? By making different choices the next time the same situation presents itself.
One of my lessons has been to not put my foot in my mouth by saying something about someone I wouldn’t want them to know I said. I did that once in an email to an employee I supervised, and then realized I had hit Reply All instead of simply Reply, like I intended to do. Wow. Took me a while to get over that flub. Of course another lesson in that example is to be very careful before sending email.
I also learned:
I am not responsible for another person’s feelings. However, I am responsible for choosing to be considerate of another’s feelings. Not because of who they are, but because of who I am. (read—who I choose to be)
And I choose to be a person who is polite, courteous, kind, thoughtful and respectful to all I meet.
The lessons you come into this world to learn will present themselves to you over and over again until you learn them. Once you have, then you will continue to the next lesson
Thinking about this later this morning I thought of one of my lessons that I learned that I do not have to repeat. That is allowing people to talk to me in a way that I do not deserve.
When I encounter someone who speaks to me in a rude, abusive, or controlling way, giving me orders when they have no right to do so, I learned to say to them, “I do not talk to people that way, nor do I allow people to speak to me that way.”
Once, my husband Bill and I were walking down the street of a small town when a stranger yelled at me, saying, “Stop. Do NOT walk down that street.”
I didn’t know the man from Adam, and turned to him and said, “Is that a please?”
“Oh, please, yes, please, ma’am. We are filming a movie and you were walking right into the scene we were shooting. But that was rude of me. I should have asked please.”
My husband marveled at my immediate response. I hadn’t even stopped to wonder who the man was, or why he didn’t want me to walk that way. I simply knew I deserved to be asked in a polite, courteous manner. I don’t know where my response came from, but it did teach me that is one lesson I have learned. That I deserve to be treated with the same courtesy and respect I give others, and I do not have to settle for anything less than that.
Learning Lessons Over and Over Again
As long as we live, lessons will present themselves to us to learn.
Now if that’s not the most discouraging lesson of all! After all the work I’ve done on myself all these years, one would think I’d learned all my lessons and could coast till the end.
Not so. Very few of us receive the truth complete, unabridged and sight-blinding, because of instantaneous illumination. We learn it one tiny step at the time. Sometimes, even when we’ve learned it, we find ourselves learning the same lesson all over again, but in an even deeper way.