My favorite font for writing is American Typewriter. I suppose it comes from my long-term fascination with the beginnings of my manual typing career…ere…education. I remember middle school, grade Seven and Mrs. Walker. I suppose, some things we never forget. Something we never forget, and it’s a good thing. What about the things we hold onto but we need to let go of? How far will we take those heavy bags, with us in the journey of life?
Below are three questions I was presented with today and which I challenged myself to answer them within a minute. My responses are below according to the DailyOm’s 365 Days to Clear:
- How I hope to feel as a result of clearing what no longer serves and supports me is______
Focus. I think the focus is what I will have, despite the noise and the chaos around me. I will also be strong, stronger than I was before the focus, before the clearing.
- What I hope to let go of is______
Fear. I think the fear of the unknown is one of the biggest things I have to let go of in the journey. I have found something interesting today. Someone asked me, what do you think is the reason you have had the fear of the unknown? I honestly cannot answer the question without much more thought. I suppose it is my journey to discover it and therefore, change.
- What I hope to attract is______
Three things: Positivity, encouraging individuals, and hope. Positivity, the essential ingredient to overcoming obstacles in our thinking!
Positive focus is something we need in our life. It is like upscaling the old materials/particles in life and turning them into something worthy, like refreshing our souls. There are opportunities around me to find the new from the old. Vision is essential. Vision beyond sight, actually means we move from a point in life where the old becomes a brand new amazing creation. Life doesn’t have to end because someone is broken. It can become a whole new vision; hope, like what I want to have in my life after the clearing.
How far will you carry the old things; dragging them around by the miserable stories they left behind? I suppose, until we are good and ready! Do we have to wait until someone points out the direction of our thinking or can find it ourselves? I suppose either is true.
I sit here in the bookstore, Barnes and Nobles, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. People mill about the books isles, browsing, looking for something or nothing. In the café, where Starbucks resides, people are noisy. They have little respect for others who are browsing. Some look at calendars, supposing they are looking for inspirational thoughts. Or not. Who knows what people want here at the bookstore. As I reflect on the three questions, I also gaze around me, wondering if anyone else ponders such deep sentiments as I am proceeding to do. I don’t expect it to be accomplished in one sitting, I have today to create the thoughts and tomorrow to digest them, and then the next to recreate them into a living, breathing, refreshed thought. There are some students, studying together, sharing a cup of coffee.
I picked up the first, no, rather, the second magazine that caught my eye. The first as a Breathe Journal, which was for logging in thoughts, and the second, Happinez: Positive, Wise, and Loving Life. I like to do that. It is like challenging myself to pick up a random book/magazine and then use it during the writing. The writing, today, correlates much too close to my thinking. For instance, the idea of the Child’s Pose, for Yoga enthusiasts, enthralls me. I liked the pose, never knowing why it was called that, but not even thought though; I flip through the magazine and find the topic. When one curls up in child’s pose, they stretch their arms out, their head is curled under, the knees are bent, where the person, curls up into a fetal position. Pent up emotions come tumbling out and one can embrace them as they roll out, simply becoming free and recycled. Powerful thought!
In the changes one experiences as life moves forward, we can either embrace the changes or stay stuck. Stuck, to me, seems so bland and dark. I suppose dank even if one feels the darkness like a fog in their souls. For this, to stick, you have to wallow in the darkness and sadness. Revisiting the pain and the debris of yesterday and rehashing it over with anyone who comes along, rather than letting it settle, shift, and slip into fertilizer for a new plot of land; your land.
My life is a story. Your life is a story. It is a blessing or a curse. You get to create the end of the story, or at least how thoroughly you shift your focus. There is a lesson to be learned in every avenue of our journey. The lesson can include how to refocus oneself or how to become stuck. It depends on what you do with it as it comes along. You get what you need in life, not always what one wants. Need is subjective though. Think about it, who ‘needs’ abuse, pain, sorrow? However, in the whole picture, if you take the loss, pain, abuse, and sorrow and turn it into a testimony, filled with amazing transformations then you are the author of the story, not the recipient of grief and loss. Can you grasp that thought?
The important scenes in your life come as you recall them, some spontaneously and others through the triggers of smell, visions, hearing, and touch. You cannot control the triggers to the memories, you can, however, control how you respond to them. I suppose, embracing them isn’t too hard if you are open-minded. It can become a stumbling block if you resist growing.
Growing is hard work! It means your thinking must shift and the dynamics take on a whole new meaning.
Are you ready for some major shifts in life? Sometimes, a major shift for one person is simply another piece-meal step for someone else. It depends on the resiliency and perception of the individual. Our story and our experience, though mirrored as it appears in other’s lives, really are our own. There are only snapshots of others in our stories. We, our own brains, our own lives, make up the perceptions we take into our souls and those perceptions shape how we respond to triggers, life events, and trauma. It is no wonder there is no magic pill or one-size-fits-all therapy. We are not made to be cookie-cutter people! We might have heroes we emulate in life; however, our story never identically replicates the one we seek to capture. We are our own authors and therefore, what choices we make impact how we move our lives through the journey of life.
You can show the world your miracle of life, in the tiny places: how you respond to negative traffic (bad drivers), rude salesmen, pushy religious people, gabby bookstore loiterers, and the list continues…How much baggage are you taking with you through life? Each time you respond in a negative way to any of the above or other situations you provide the dark places in life to win and the brilliant hope for tomorrow to diminish. Could you imagine a world where everyone reduced his or her baggage so life was brighter?
“Each one, reach one.” A great motto for changing lives starts with reaching into our own dark corners, seeking out the ways it took away our spark in life and replacing it with what was wish to attract and what we hope to receive with the simple act of focus. Go ahead; become aware of your words, actions, attitudes (Internal and External), and the tones of your voice every single day.
What are you carrying with you?
Just a thought by Pamela
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Previously published on Medium.com.
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Photo credit: Pamela J. Nikodem
