Ever found that you’ve got from one end of a month to the other and not really remembered what happened in between 1 and 31? We live our lives all too often in either a blur or a daze, but have you ever stopped to think that the life that you know now – the one you are living right now – could change instantly? 

Whether it’s really bad, or really good, things will change, either because of tragedy, because we live a life of cycles and ebb and flow, or because changes over time add up and then you get to a point where it’s too late to change things back, if at all.  (That’s often where relationships break down, because you can’t begin to untangle the steps that got you to where you no longer love this person in front of you, or even sometimes, like them). 

Nothing is permanent.   Our normal lives can change through our choice or factors completely beyond our control, yet we live them as if all will be the same tomorrow and the next day, and the next.  We stop living in the moment and stop paying attention to what brings us joy, not realising whatever we are doing right now could be the last time we ever do that thing. The “little happiness” and the “present moment” are things I’m learning about, and lately I’ve been thinking about all those other things we take for granted that bring us happiness or contentment that might not just be part of our lives the next day.  The things I take for granted.  Especially the things I take for granted.

Whatever you’re doing today, whatever brings you joy and happiness – enjoy!  Stop long enough  to enjoy it by being fully present – not while sitting on a computer, not while ironing or cleaning or cooking or working.   This isn’t about being maudlin; it’s about appreciating what we have while we still have it.  It could, after all, be the last time you ever:

• Speak to your mum on the phone
• Enjoy the smell of freshly baked bread, coffee, roses, perfume, babies, roast dinners, curries, wine, chocolate, great baking or crisps   
• Read, to see the faces of those you love, a wedding dress, the colours of nature, the sky or the moon, snowdrops and bluebells
• Hear the wind or the rain beating on your house while you’re tucked up in bed, the sea, music – or a loved one’s voice
• Taste pavlova, ice cream sundaes, crème brulee, pate, fish and chips, pizza or chocolate cake
• Drink cola, orange juice, wine, beer, champagne or any alcohol – so those long girlie cocktail afternoons will never be quite the same again
• Have dinner with your closest friends before they tell you they are about to emigrate to the other side of the world.
• Take your beloved pet for a walk
• Feel your child slipping their hand into yours or you get a hug freely given without them looking to see if their friends see them doing it

My daughter is just about to make the very difficult decision to pull out of university until they figure out what is wrong with her health.  Knowing she would be unable to graduate, she realised she was sitting in what was possibly her last ever lecture.  It made her stop, slow down and notice all she hadn’t noticed before, to store it away in her memory bank.   Most of us never get this chance.  More often than not, we don’t know we are doing something for the last time.   We either miss its absence at some point in the future, or the change comes with no warnings, no fanfares, and life as you know it is no longer the same.  You will hopefully get comfortable with a new normality or learn to live in a new way – but perhaps it’s time to see the little happiness, live in the present moment. It’s time to pay attention. Now.  

What would you miss tomorrow if it was taken away today?

If life is a tapestry, then mine is one woven with words.

As a cross-stitcher, I follow a pattern so that stitch by stitch, a picture is revealed, on one side at least. The other side is a jumble of colours and textures, of darkness and light. MY tapestry is different – it’s been over 40 years in the making, and there’s been no pattern to follow, yet as I look at what is completed, I can see themes emerge nonetheless. And I can see that it isn’t perfect, but it’s still turning into something wonderful.

My tapestry has all the colours of the rainbow in it, from the pastel background words like housework, commute, sleep, dinner (for six or more), school runs and work, to the basic greens and blues of any landscape. The greens are those of farms, market gardens and the joy of growing up on the edge of an Irish country estate, to the blues of something borrowed/something blue, the azure blue of the Maldives and the ever-changing blues of sailing on Strangford Lough.

There are the misty grey colours of boredom, frustration, illness and injury – when perhaps the tapestry has been set down for a while before being picked up again.

Here and there, too, are accent colours of the white of words like hope, and change through to the black and white of fundamentalism and growing up in the Troubles, to the deep dark night blackness of words like depression, divorce, despair.

Throughout, you can see the candy-striped words of four-kids-in-five-years, books, moving to Scotland with new words like puddock and spicket, and the words that weave in and through each other, like daughter, mother, sister, wife, friend, employee, manager, coach, writer, poet, judge.

All my life, I’ve loved words. I don’t ever remember learning to read. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the little chair my dad made for me in front of the one radiator in the hall that heated the rest of the house, thrilled because I had a new book to me, and oblivious to people walking around me to get to their rooms.

By the time I was in Primary 4, I had exhausted the school library, and my teacher Mr Leckey, would cycle a 10 mile round trip to bring me books from the public library once a week.

By the time I was 14, I’d read Anne Frank’s diary and Mein Kampf, much of Agatha Christie, H G Wells and Hitchcock’s work, and I’d fallen in love with Shakespeare, Churchill, Dickens, James Joyce and the War Poets.

Which is not to say I didn’t read the books of childhood like Milly Molly Mandy and Billy Bunter; and I WAS George in the Famous Five, Nancy Drew in her mysteries, Anne of the Green Gables – and a hobbit. When the Lord of the Rings came to the cinema, I held my breath to see if it lived up to my imagination – and found unbelievably, that it did. And later, when the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came out, I found I had tears in my eyes as Lucy found the wardrobe and found the entrance to Narnia, having so often tried to find that myself.

A few years ago, I went to the little museum in the Leadhills in Ayrshire, and I sat in the library there at the end of the tour, surrounded by books while a soundtrack played. A lead miner, in poverty and on a pittance, was explaining why he wanted to borrow one of the precious books there, knowing he would read while exhausted, by candlelight, in a hovel that dripped water. He swore to keep the books spotlessly clean, so he could educate himself and change his future, and provide his children with a different life. And when he spoke of why he wanted to read, and talked of how a book smelled and felt to him, I would again have tears in my eyes as I found a kindred spirit speaking to me down through the years.

Always, I’ve HAD to read. And when the children were very small and I was also looking after my husband’s elderly aunt, I would creep to the bathroom – the only door with a lock on it – just to read a paragraph of a book, and find my space.

And then in 2000, it all stopped. After several years when I should have left my marriage but felt paralysed by financial and cultural constraints, and when the words I used were reduced to those like whisper, silence and invisibility, I finally took the decision to walk towards love and happiness. I needed all my energy to build a new life and social circle, settle into a new job so I could provide for the children, and make a new home. And I found I could not read, outside of what I had to do to survive. For almost a year, I could not read a magazine, a newspaper – or a recipe. At times I wondered if I would ever love words again, but once I’d remembered who I was, I did.

So my reading material changed – to lecturers notes, business books on human resource management, finance and strategy, as I worked at night to get my degree. Then as I moved on in the workforce, words like policies, contracts, Acts of Parliament and Statutory Instruments and minutes of Senior Team Meetings became my reading material, introducing lots of new words to my tapestry.

In 2002, I read Cheryl Richardson’s Stand Up For Your Life; and I realised words could change lives as I learned how to stand up for MY life, start to find my own voice again and use it, and with that, came the ability to write poems and books and letters and emails of encouragement.

2005 saw the words around NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming – introduced, as I became a Master practitioner and an Eriksonian Hypnotherapist – and realised fully the power of words to enslave or change easily.

Still, there would be uphill words like depression, stress and exit interviews, and downhill words like flow, and strength, confidence and joy, as well as new words like “the truth, the whole truth,” and “desert simpliciter.”

And you will also see the gold and silver that highlight my story. Words like:

“It’s a boy,” “it’s a girl” – twice..
“Enough is enough, grievance and chief executive, and tribunal”
“I do – I very much do” to Lee when I married him. And if you listened carefully, you would hear words like joyful weeping when our guests heard him promise to cherish his new family, name by name.

If you could see my tapestry, you’d see words like “What Would You See, If You Dared To Be Free” – a poem of hope, published for charity. You’d see a Book Club I formed at work, to get me to read other genres and come across wonders like “A Thousand Splendid Suns.”

And you’d see Facebook and words like connection, and the use of written communication – but you’d also see Toastmasters, a tool that will increase my ability to verbally communicate my words to you all

At the outset of 2012, as usual, my “themes” and words for the year were clear – miracles, slowing down, letting go.  January was an amazing month in all these areas – yet, as usually happens, a month in and that’s already changing.  It happens.  I’m not forgetting the original aims, but I know now to be flexible and change as other things appear (often because you start to work on the other areas).   “Suddenly,” the issue of boundaries appeared.  It had been there, lurking – but it seemed to be a major theme for a number of my friends for 2012.   I was interested to see how they would learn to do set or maintain boundaries, but I knew it wasn’t one of my themes. 

And the Universe laughed – because of course it turned out that it was actually something I would need to consider this year, and I realised that because of the reaction I had to a particular blog – a reaction mirrored by one of my friends who already knew this was one of her themes.

For a while now, she’s wanted an allotment, a necessary tool for her in so many ways, but when she found out she’d got one, the critical thing appeared not to be what she planted in it – but the limits of the allotment.  She felt she needed to get her boundaries defined, not just of her own allotment, but it seemed that all those with allotments in that area “had” to define the wider area too, by planting trees.  This was such an important issue I knew that on a soul level, boundaries must be important to her, and so it turned out.   I sent her the link that I sent many friends, a blog that seemed to resonate with so many people in different ways – and I laughed when I got her response, because it was such an unexpectedly strong response; a response that had mirrored mine.

While she could absolutely see where the blogger was coming from AND her need to say what she had said, and do what she did in setting very clear boundaries in all areas of her life, she still felt that she was a “selfish cow,” in putting her own needs before others.  I understood her reaction, and I laughed because I’d almost had the same reaction.  And we both understood, because we’ve been there before on other issues, that such a vehement reaction meant that there were lessons in there that we needed to learn.

Reading the blog was perfect timing for me, as for a number of reasons, I was moving swiftly to full blown martyr syndrome about all I needed to do around the house, about what I seemed to be required to do in my job, and about certain friendships that were more about taking rather than giving.   As a result of reading it, I was able to re-establish some boundaries, re-define others, and set some new ones (making it clear respectfully what I expected going forward), and found I did so more easily than I expected. And I honoured and nurtured myself in the process, so I could easily answer my inner critic when she tried to send me on a guilt trip

There are so many boundaries I feel it makes sense to protect – my time, my resources, my values and beliefs, my plans, how I spend my time, and who I spend that with, as well as the messages I choose to listen to; but more interestingly, I’m finding that I’m actually challenging long held boundaries, to see if those beliefs are still true to me.  Boundaries protect us in so many ways, and make life simpler because we know where we are with them, and we know what we cross.   So much of what I do or don’t do is around what my parents thought or what society thinks – ways of being that may have been useful at a time, but now limit my life.  Much of my life was lived with boundaries of orange and green, fundamental and “other”, and I know this is not how I wish to live now.

It’s my life, and that means it’s MY boundaries that matter, as long as I hold to the principle of “do no harm.”  So better late than never, I’m figuring out what they might actually be.. and where I might need to put my toe over any I currently have, and start crossing those that no longer serve me ;-)

What boundaries might you need to re-evaluate, re-define – or cross?

Namaste

Somewhere in between that time and now, life happened. Sometimes, the noise and business was necessary, because then I drowned out pain, hurt, rejection or loneliness. Sometimes it was necessary because if I allowed myself to be still, I would meet who I really was, and for so many years, it was easier to run than face that lack of perfection. But that was exhausting, and learning to love myself was, in the end, easier.

Now, I am happiest when with my family or my close friends, those who inspire & encourage me. Yet, still, I am finding that solitude is returning slowly, gently, peacefully. It’s a choice I make because my spirit longs for it. My journal always helps; it is as vital to me as breathing now.. But over the last few days the message of solitude, refuge, retreat has been so clear that I’m going to take myself off for a few days to allow myself to fully connect with all that I am so that I can be all I can be.

This will be difficult for me, and was something I may not have done. My diary is already full, while I have other demands not yet fitted in, I feel guilty leaving others – and I have hardly ever been on my own, silent, in so many years that I can’t imagine how I will cope with it. And then, I read this perfect poem…

It is a difficult
lesson to learn today,
to leave one’s friends
and family and deliberately
practise the art of solitude
for an hour or a day
or a week.
For me, the break
is most difficult….

And yet, once it is done,
I find there is a quality
to being alone that is
incredibly precious.

Life rushed back into the void,
richer,
more vivid,
fuller than before.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Seek answers that feel right within your soul. Your soul knows what the truth is, and it will tell you through feelings. Always listen to your feelings. They know … they know.

Live, experience, feel. Do not seek to identify yourself. You will never have a point of understanding from which you can say, “This is who I am!”, for in each expanding moment of consciousness, of being God, who you are will have changed into the next moment of being.To know who you are is to feel what you feel each moment.

Never do anything, no matter how far you are into it, if you lose the joy of it and it becomes monotonous and mundane. Do away with it and do something else that brings happiness. For perhaps what you needed to learn from it you have already achieved. Go wherever you want to go, do whatever you want to do, for as long as you want to.

Create only for the mere joy of creating. When you create for you, you will soon find yourself living in joy.

Don’t ever strive to have anyone understand you.If they wish to understand, they will.

Love everyone. Have compassion for all other entities. You do not need to go and take care of them. Love them by allowing them to express however they choose. That is the greatest thing you can do! If they are angered or disappointed by your life, love them by allowing them to be they way.Then you have become a great god, a great light!

Author Unknown

Difficult times, in retrospect, are more romantic than good times, if they are overcome. Myths and fables are made of them.”

Ben Okri

When you’re weary
Feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all

I’m on your side
When times get rough
And friends just can’t be found
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

A Course in Miracles says, “You are not really capable of being tired, but you are capable of wearying yourself.” I totally get this. Weariness can come via hard work or lack of sleep but often it comes from our thinking and then our actions.

We get worn out, believing the “world is on our shoulders,” often because we believe we are super heroes. We have to save the world – as well as be brilliant at our work, keep the house perfect, bring up impeccably genius children, keep ourselves fit, be beautiful, keep a full social calendar, be the best sibling/child and/or partner,be the perfect hostess and have an impact on our neighbourhood, don’t we?

Don’t we? At one level we know this isn’t possible – on another level we keep doing it and then wonder why we might feel exhausted. We think we are Super Heroes with shiny capes and believe our own story that we need to save the world and no-one else can help us do it. We don’t see our crooked halos and often don’t realise we are wearying ourselves through such ridiculous beliefs and impossible schedules until it’s too late and we crash and burn. (yes, I do love Top Gun!)

We weary ourselves by expecting too much of ourselves – and others, but anything that sucks energy wearies us. It will be external factors like the energy vampires in our lives who keep us down or are persistently negative – and it will be internal factors like any less than totally positive thinking and behaviours.

Our time and energy are limited resources, yet too often we waste them in the wearying effort of living in fear/worry (about the past/future) OR when we use our limited precious energy in living a life behind masks, when we hold on to resentment or when we judge others. We are more than capable of wearying ourselves like that; or at least I am.

When I’m weary, feeling down, when tears are in my eyes, I have my Soul friends. Friends who are good for my soul & are not afraid to ask me hard questions – who are my bridge over troubled water. They remind me to be present, to “let it go” or to be gentle on myself and others. They straighten my halo and show me it’s actually a tiara, sometimes over teas and coffees, sometimes over cocktails. By helping me change my attitude, they restore my weary heart and remind again to protect it.

I’m blessed to have such loving support. Love is all around me.

I am loved, inspired, nurtured and encouraged.

Love is all around me.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.~Joseph Campbell

- my body does not like sugar any more, as it stings my mouth
- I fear silence much more than I thought
- I want approval – or at least encouragement & validation – even when I know it doesn’t matter
- clearing the space for inner work is vital for my soul’s growth & my journal is as precious to me as gold
- I don’t understand much of what’s happening but I know it’s “all good”
- I am enjoying going more slowly already
- I have lived too long in my head with my Master NLP, Hypnotherapy, Reiki & all the studying & reading I’ve done on happiness, thinking & brain/body links
- its time to re-connect to my body & emotions fully, as without this I have a one dimensional understanding of happiness
- I’ve more discipline than I thought (thanks Richard Bandler)
- Removing the ego is hard. It’s stuck with superglue and sewn under my skin. Like learning compassion, I’m realising this will be a life-long lesson for me
- It hurts, this change, this stepping into the silence that means I truly know myself. And I had forgotten how painful change can be, even when I want it.

And that’s just for starters. As I was thinking about this I realised that what really matters this year is me. I need to love, inspire, nurture & encourage me & then do the same for others. If I walk my path with integrity then this will all come back to me as I attract what I focus on. So it’s all good again.

And then I read Louise Hay’s thought for today which says, “I give to others all the things I wish to receive.” Now that’s a miracle of validation
That’s all I’m meant to do. It’s time to put aside my fears, it’s time to just relax and be me, and that also means it’s time to let everything else go.

So then; let me let those go of anything that no longer serves my higher good. I have no need to hold on to anyone who do not wish to hear what I say. They are simply marching to the beat of their own drum after all. Let me let those go who see no value in anything I do, knowing their eyes scan what is irrelevant to them and settle on what brings them beauty and meaning. They have walked with me until now, but I must give them freedom to walk their own paths and let them go in love. And wish them joy.

I’m just grateful that I all-ready know that letting go is what creates space for the new and wonderful-to-come. Bring it on!

We are not children any more. So why do we allow our parents or teachers voices to ring in our heads when we are free to choose what we want to hear instead?

If there was no encouragement given, if others fears were projected on to us, if little love or hope was offered, or what we remember is negativity or criticism, this is not our truth. It’s simply our past – and it’s time to forgive and let it go. Nothing you do or think will change it, and holding on to it is holding you back from being all that you can be.

People do the best they can at the time. It’s how you live your own life, so don’t expect others to live more perfectly than you. They simply did what you did, and lived out THEIR parents and teachers values, belief and examples, without question – except where they chose to break free and tell a different story. And you are no different.

If you choose to see it that way, your past has been your apprenticeship. It has brought you to where you are now. And you are the edge of the future of your own choice where you are responsible for your own life, with control of your thoughts.

Every action is first a thought. Until now, when you failed to treat yourself lovingly, when you hesitated before doing something you wanted to do, when you failed to speak (or chose to be angry and silent) or didn’t act because you were worried about what others might say, your thinking was wrong. You were thinking negatively, from a place of judgement, lack and fear.

Choose to live instread with confidence, love, joy, hope and peace. You are loved. You are already good enough. You CAN do what you want; climb higher, reach further, and walk on the wire that’s YOUR life.

Your future starts now, and it’s the perfect time to start talking to yourself in a different way. Choose your plot, choose your ending. Be your own hero, live your own adventure, weave your own magic – because YOU are now the storyteller