Life Has Changed for the Better

My life is still turned upside down, sort of.

I held another snake the other day.

On Sunday I went hiking — all day — and the yard needs to be cut, the house is filthy, and I’m working the next 11 days in a row and then leaving town for a few days, and I’m not worried about any of it.

What has happened to me?

Did you catch that? I held another snake. Yikes. Not a big deal, you might think. For me it is.

What’s happening, what happened to me? Did I finally figure out I’m not that big of a deal? Did I realize just how little control I have on the world and that I don’t have to keep all the plates spinning?

I keep up with high profile murder and missing person cases. I think I started that with Jon Benet Ramsey, or I might have picked up on that later while reading online about another case. I remember a lot about the O.J. Simpson case. I remember where I was when I heard that Laci Peterson was missing. When Elizabeth Smart was found I was online on a crime forum typing in how she wouldn’t be found when I heard it on the news in the background.

Now there’s the Caylee Anthony case. A reality television show that nobody could have dreamed of. That poor little girl was murdered and thrown out like trash and her mother, Casey Anthony, in jail accused of killing her, rants to her parents that she’s lost everything and she does not mean her daughter.

I don’t like drama in my life. Maybe that’s why these high-profile cases attract my attention. I can watch the crazy drama and not have to live it.

There are so many things and situations that I’m grateful to not have experienced. I’ve had my excitement, I hope. I’ve had drama. I’ve lived on the edge and almost died. I like calm now.

I stopped in the woods Sunday while hiking so I could just listen. There was a stream flowing visible for at least half of the four-and-a-half mile hike. It made a beautiful sound. Sometimes I heard leaves rustling and prayed it wasn’t a rattlesnake.

My life is simplified of late.

For the past several months I’ve been working two jobs and trying to find time to promote my book. I’m no longer on a partial layoff; I’ve had all of my hours restored, so any time I work at the second job it’s extra income.

It’s been tough and it has changed me. The worry and stress about what might be has been bad. But here I am on the other side of that, at least this time around, this recession.

Life is good.

In other news: I sold another book internationally this weekend. This one is headed to France.

The books will make wonderful Christmas presents. It’s always fun to get a new book to start on January 1 and follow through the year.

What is the Lesson?

Sometimes, often actually, I wonder what the lesson is when I’m going through a difficult time.

Currently, as I’ve written about before, I’m on a partial layoff at my job. Because of that I probably got my book ready for press sooner than I would have. But I’ve had to endure some things I would never have chosen for myself to try to make up the lost income.

I’ve had to do some heavy labor, the first time a job I chose, but didn’t know how physically affecting it would be. The second time at a part-time job that seemed easy until I was told to go outside and do landscape work.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to be outside and enjoy working in my own yard. And at first the thought of working outside didn’t seem so bad because I really do hate to just sit around. However, after about an hour the work became increasingly difficult as my body tired, the temperature crept over 90 degrees, and I was deserted by a coworker half my age, literally.

I guess I say all that to get around to my point, which is, what lesson am I supposed to be learning? I do know that losing income has shown me that I can get out of my routine and survive. It’s caused me to look outside of the box at options I would not consider if I didn’t have a partial layoff.

And so far at least it’s proven that I am being taken care of and will survive even if there are rough patches in the midst of it all.

I think it’s softened me to the plight of others, too. Sometimes we lose and suffer not because of what we do or don’t do, but rather because of things out of our control.

And because of that, I turn to the Serenity Prayer:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

The proofs for Living Life Inside Out have been returned to the printer and I should have copies of the book within 20 working days. The photo above is a shot of the cover proof and the dedication page. It’s actually not a great photo, the book will look much better.

More information and options for ordering the book soon.

Learning By Doing

“As one goes through life one learns that if you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move.”
—Katharine Hepburn

No matter how spoiled and coddled a person is in their childhood, or some even as adults, real life experiences both with successes and failures, are what propel us through life, growth and recovery.

We may lament every time we perform at a level less than we expect of ourselves, but for every supposed failure we learn and grow. We don’t gain wisdom or strength through other people’s lives and experiences. We learn and grow when we attempt and fail and even when we do something with success because we did it.

Just as an athlete cannot become a professional or set a world record simply by watching how someone else did it, neither can we live our lives and make it on our journey with only observation as a tool. We learn what we can from others, sometimes we may avoid certain failures when we see another experience them. But as a rule our growth is ours from doing rather than seeing.

We may feel as if we paddle upstream at times. And perhaps we want others to do for us, but in the long run we gain much more wisdom, strength, and growth through our own actions. Even when the going gets tough, we can rest assured that we will come out on the other side of it with the experience that taught us something.

Even when the current is rough, you must paddle if you want to get through it.

Good and Bad Judgment

“Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.”
—Rita Mae Brown

Our lives do not always follow a path that is smooth and easy. Some of us went down the road of drug abuse or alcoholism and had lots of experiences from bad judgment that taught us. If we had not made the decisions we made that caused us pain and loss we might not have learned the lessons that we did.

Our experiences can help others, and we never want to see someone else go down that same road, but because we have we cannot judge when they do and we find ourselves more able to understand why.

I often find myself beginning to judge another for some action or behavior. More often than not the situation is very similar to one I was in when I was the age of the one I am standing in judgment of. It causes me to pause and reflect upon my own life and how readily able I find myself to judge someone else.

My path took me to the depths of despair, but the lessons learned many years ago have stayed with me; they usually do when we truly find ourselves that far down. 

I was reminded of this when a famous athlete from my home state, who at the time of this event was in the NFL making millions of dollars, was busted for cocaine possession. It was shocking and many people were interviewed or posted online their reaction to it. Words such as stupid, loser, thug and others were thrown around and I wondered how many of those who were casting judgment had ever done anything they regretted when they were 25 years old.

We often make mistakes in our lives and our memories are short lived about them sometimes. We can be grateful for our lessons learned and realize that when others make mistakes that it’s time for them to learn something too. We can give others the same right to make a mistake as we had.

Bad judgment teaches us lessons, but we are not to judge others for theirs.

Things Happen for a Reason

“When God closes a door, he opens a window.”
—Unknown

One of the most difficult things to understand is how we can desire something so badly and not get it. No matter how many times we pray, no matter that we feel we deserve something, we still don’t get it. And we get frustrated with God, maybe people too.

Every once in a while we have an experience where that door just will not open for us, or if it does it gets slammed in our face before we know it, but we realize quickly that it was a good thing that we didn’t get “it.”

That’s when we understand the quote above. And maybe while we realized why we didn’t get “it” we also noticed that there was at least one other “it” waiting for us, or suddenly seemingly out of nowhere something better presented itself. A thing we didn’t have to beg for; something for which we didn’t have to sacrifice quite so much.

These are moments in our lives that bring wisdom. They are the experiences and events that nobody can really teach us, but that we learn through the suffering of not getting and the surprise of receiving something else.

Often we are so busy looking at the closed door that we do not see the open window. When we pray for something we ought to pray that we can have wisdom about a thing so that perhaps our desire for something we aren’t going to get will fade more quickly and our eyes will not be blind to that other thing that’s there, just waiting on us to notice it.

If you just look past that closed door you might see an open window.

Stormy Times

“Talents are best nurtured in solitude, but character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sometimes we think we’ve finally got it. We find ourselves in a place that we have been working towards in our life. We have inner peace. Our head is on straight. Life feels good. And that’s when the hurricane winds blow in and sweep us off our feet and throw us around like rag dolls. Our emotions feel like we are still back in that place before all of our growing occurred. But we haven’t lost what we gained it’s just hidden behind those icky emotions that have currently moved in.

It happens. But when we reframe it into the fact that we are building character through our difficulties it becomes much easier to deal with. We really never “get there” in life. It’s a journey and for those of us who strive to continue to grow, the stormy weather of life will blow in and make us doubt our previous growth. If we ever actually got “there” wherever that is, we would then be stuck and life would become boring.

It’s always helpful to remember that change is going to happen. Whether we are in that place of inner peace and think we have finally arrived, or we are on our knees begging God to take our pain away, whatever is going on will change with time. It may happen in an instant or it may happen in a month, but things don’t stay the same.

We really can never predict when the storms of life will strike. But they will. Just as the times of happiness, peace, joy and all the good things come to us, so the trials and tribulations come too. And it’s in the storms that we grow stronger. It’s where character and faith is built. The winds that blow through our happy times aren’t curses from God or the Universe or anything out there, they are blessings in disguise. It won’t feel that way while we are in the midst of the struggle, but when we get to the other side, we’ll see that it was for our good.

When stormy weather blows in don’t struggle with why, look for the lesson and growth instead.

Persevering Through Trials

“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise”
—Oscar Wilde

Trials and suffering are often the way we learn and grow. Sometimes when something is really difficult and we seem to be trying to swim against the tide it probably means that we aren’t supposed to have that thing. Trials and suffering is not the same thing as hard work.

Getting a college degree or beyond is difficult at times during the process, but we don’t give up over that type of difficulty. The trials and suffering that may be telling us to give up and let go are of a different sort. They probably involve people and situations out of our control and may be things that we will never be able to conquer. And maybe that’s because we never were supposed to.

And if the trial isn’t teaching us to let go of whatever it is, then there’s some other lesson in it. The Big Book of AA teaches that nothing happens by mistake, and if we believe that then we get in the midst of trials and tribulations for a reason. Sometimes the lessons from things are our lessons and sometimes we are the teacher.

If we find ourselves in what seems to be a losing battle with a person or situation, we can take some time to really examine what is happening and try our best to determine if it’s time to let go or fight harder for whatever it is.

Seeing trials as opportunities helps us move past the pain involved.

Look for the Lesson

“Are you focusing on the circumstances of your life instead of the lessons? Instead of asking why, learn to ask what the lesson is. The moment you become ready to accept it, the lesson will become clear.”
—Melody Beattie

Life can sure throw us some curve balls at times causing us to wonder why this or that experience came our way. We often can’t see the reason why we got what we got, or didn’t get what we wanted, or lost what we had.

We can continue to focus and live in the “why me” way of thinking or we can choose to do what Melody Beattie suggests above and look for the lessons in the circumstances. There are lessons in everything we do, usually more so in the difficulties in life than those things that bring us joy.

When we take the focus off of “why” and look for the lesson, it can also help us to let go of those things which are causing us pain. When we stop obsessing about why and step out of it as much as we can for the moment, it takes away some of the power of the situation. Stopping, even if we can only do it a minute or two at a time, and asking what the lesson is … focusing on that instead of “it” can help us along the way.

Often when we are in the grips of a painful situation the last thing we think of to look for is the lesson. However, if we begin now, with one thing in our lives, and start making it a way of thinking, a habit, we will begin to look for the lessons in all things that happen to us. The lessons may surprise us too; we may learn something we weren’t even seeking to know.

Look for the lesson instead of asking “why me.”

Go With What You Know

“I feel there are two people inside me — me and my intuition. If I go against her, she’ll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely.”
—Kim Basinger

Webster’s states that intuition is “knowing things without conscious reasoning.” Whether we know things without having to think them through because of some sixth sense, or because we’ve been there and done that before, it’s the same thing — it’s that we know something and we should go with what we know.

There are all kinds of people in this world who will manipulate and lie to us. And often we will let them do it time after time because even though our gut instinct is to not go there again, we think perhaps they will be different this time, or they need us, or wow, they are actually showing us attention. But often our thinking is as skewed as their behavior if we think of giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Sometimes we just know not to return to certain places with particular people. Our intuition, instinct, intellect, experiences, or something tells us what we should do. And we ought to follow that. We learn, over time and experiences, that more often than not what we really believe about something is correct, especially as we grow in recovery and spiritually.

We learn to trust our gut. We learn that it’s possible to err on either side of an issue, but better than to keep making the same mistakes.

Try following your intuition; it’s more trustworthy than you may think.

Repeating Messages

“Life will teach you the lessons it is up to you to learn them.”
—Unknown

When we keep getting the same message from different sources that’s a clear sign that our Higher Power is trying to tell us something, especially when that message comes from the places we least expect it.

If the message to love keeps being offered up to you, love more. If forgiveness is what you are hearing, time to forgive. If you see the message to work on your spirituality, do that. Sometimes God has to keep telling us to do something.

The message may start out small and from one source until we keep ignoring it and it ends up like a drumbeat in our head we hear it so much. We hear it from people, we see it in the books we read, we get the message in church or at a recovery meeting.

It takes what it takes for each of us to move into a new area of growth, or to work on something we haven’t spent much time on, or to return to the same old “thorn in our side” issue once again.

We most likely will still be sent the “problems” and messages to work on the areas we need to work on until we do something about them. Life, God, the Universe, whoever is your higher power will move you to action.

Listen to the messages and heal.