Brad Pitt said it best...

Brad Pitt is on the cover of a magazine this month...I can't remember which one.... and I just finished reading the article about him and his life choices. I've never been a huge fan of his. I think his acting is good enough but I've never been drawn to his body of work or him for that matter until recently. His work with architects in New Orleans building homes for Hurricane Katrina survivors, his openness to adoption, his belief that everyone deserves the right to marry if they choose....all these beliefs are in sync with my own. He's beginning to show a much deeper side of himself, something his movie role choices haven't always conveyed. And so I'm drawn to that. Suddenly he's interesting to me. That's probably why I read the article...because I wanted to see what he had to say. And he didn't disappoint me....


He said something that resonated with me...something I've never heard put quite so eloquently and so perfectly.  He said....

• “I’ve always been at war with myself, for right or wrong. I don’t know how to explain it more. There’s that constant argument going on in your head about this or that. It’s universal. Some people are better at dealing with it, and they sleep with no pain — not pain, arguments. I’ve grown quite comfortable with being at war.”

Those words are 100%, no 1000%, exactly how I feel. That's how my brain has always worked. There is a constant push-pull of looking back, digging for the truth, pushing forward, searching and seeking, calculated moves and weighed risks. It's a never ending battle that I fought to win for so many years but now I know it just is. It's not going away because it's how I am wired. I'm more explorer than conqueror, more curious than content. For a long time I considered it a demon to either out run or sacrifice myself to but finally I've become comfortable in this skin of mine.

I realize now that trying to learn how to conform to those around me is wasted time and effort. I'm not like everyone else because I walk on a different plane. Not a better or worse plane, but a different one. It's useless to attempt to morph my life into a box that everyone else seems to fit so easily in. I don't fit and it's time to stop making excuses for that. As one of my good friend's told me recently, I should be a Zen leader. I'm not completely sure what that encompasses in her mind but I know it was a very heart-felt compliment. I also know that she sees me as someone who doesn't fit inside the box but still has much to offer the world. I probably couldn't get a better compliment.

So now I know that I walk the world just a little bit differently than everyone else but when I meet Brad, at least we'll have something to talk about.

friendship...

I had lunch yesterday with a couple of friends who I hadn't seen in over a month. We talked nonstop, mostly catching up with who's doing what and why. It was a good time and it made me think about friendship a littler deeper than I usually do. 


I have two friends who know everything about me--past, present and future. I can't think of a single thing that they don't know. Then I have a few friends who know almost everything about me--probably 95%. They definitely know what's going on in my present life and my future goals but there's a couple things from my past that I've kept private. I don't want--or need--to tell them because I already have two friends I share that part of my life with. After that I have a group of friends who probably know 70-75% of who I am. I consider anyone who falls below that threshold a coworker or acquaintance so they probably know different bits and pieces.


Many people don't have anyone who's close enough to know everything about them. It seems like it's difficult or almost impossible to truly expose ourselves completely to another human being. Some people might do it with a spouse but I'm not talking about someone you're intimately involved with. I'm talking about someone who is simply a friend that knows all your ups and downs, your heartbreaks and your happiness. And more importantly, someone who you feel comfortable enough with to show your flaws, even the ones you keep hidden deep down inside. It's not easy to trust someone enough to share with them what that nagging little voice in your head says to you. 


I'm lucky. I have really good friends. I believe to have good friends, you've got to be a good friend and that trips up most people. There's an awful lot of people in this world who think they are good friends, but they're really not. I really believe in this one area of your life more than any other, you get what you give. If you aren't surrounded by good friends, then you need to face a mirror and ask if you've been a good friend. It doesn't matter if you have one person in your life or a hundred. If you're wearing a mask with every single one of them, then you need to re-evaluate your life. You don't have to be an open book with all of them, but you need somebody who'll listen to every nasty little detail without judging you. They might tell you that you're an idiot or even threaten to kick your butt but sometimes that's exactly what you need to hear. And you need to hear it from someone you trust completely but not someone you're in love with. You need a friend who will always be there for you and let's face, love doesn't always last...no matter how much you want it to.


If you don't have a true friend to share your life with, then do the work to improve yourself and watch what happens. Everyone deserves at least one relationship in their life where they can be completely transparent. That's a holy grail everyone should be questing after.

what would you do....

For some strange reason, I awoke this morning with a question on my mind. I have no idea where it came from, but the question has been interwoven through my thoughts all day long. The question nagging my mind is "what would you do if you only had 24 hours to live?"


Imagine you awake tomorrow morning to the sound of your alarm clock or however you normally regain consciousness and you receive this message. It's not important how the message is delivered, only that you believe it. Imagine that you receive a message that says you've only got 24 hours to live. And for the purpose of this exercise, you believe it. So what would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see? Who would you tell? What would you say? What would no longer have any importance to you? What words would you struggle to get out and who would you say them to? What would you leave unsaid? Would you say good-bye?


You'd be in such a state of shock, I predict you'd probably lose at least an hour trying to wrap your head around the idea of your own impending death but hopefully you'd come to terms with the idea before letting your final day slip completely away. Eventually the shock wears off and like it or not, you'd let go of your own mortality to focus outside of yourself. Obviously you're not going to waste 8-10 hours of your final day at work and hopefully you don't waste the ten minutes it would take you to call up your boss and tell him to "take this job and shove it." Plus, I suspect there would still be this tiny glimmer of hope buried inside your heart that would prevent you from making that call...just in case the death sentence was wrong. 


Twenty-four hours is really very limiting. Twenty-four days would allow you to see places and do a couple of big things on your bucket list but twenty-four hours means you have to prioritize and get serious about who and what is most important. I suspect you'd waste some time, spending it on things that are more habitual than important. It's not like we spend time training for this day so lack of experience would definitely cause us to stumble a bit.


I spent the last few weeks with my aunt Kay when she was dying of cancer. I really don't know how long she "knew" she was dying before her diagnosis but she only lived a short time after the doctor broke the bad news to her. Even though it was only a few weeks, she still had time to go through several stages of grief. I witnessed anger, fear and a level of acceptance. Maybe acceptance is the wrong word because she was very afraid of the afterlife and her place in it so maybe acceptance is too strong a word but she definitely resigned herself to the inevitable. From the very beginning she comforted me instead of the other way around and I'm pretty sure she told me that she loved me at least 20 times a day. She always was the type to say I love you easily but I felt it so much more during the final days with her, probably because my senses were heightened and my nerves were completely raw. For some reason her biggest concern was getting her affairs in order...making sure she gave away what she wanted to. She really didn't seem to need a lot of time with her loved ones individually...maybe because the cancer was causing a lot of severe pain and the morphine became the most important part of her life. One night when we were completely alone, she said all she needed to say to me. She let me know how she really felt and I guess the beauty of it was I already knew it. She took the time to say the words that didn't need to be said....but she said them anyway, just in case.


So back to the present moment...how would you spend your final day? What message would you leave the world? What would you need to say?


For me, there's a thousand different things I could say or do but I couldn't possible get it all done in 24 hours. I'm positive I wouldn't tell anyone that today was my last day and it really isn't my style to give every person in my life a few minutes of chat time on the phone or via text message. Not to mention I doubt I could hold it together and act normal so I'd probably avoid most people as much as possible. I think I'd pack a picnic lunch, grab my special girl if I could steal her away from school and take her and my sons to the park. We'd have a picnic and I'd go down the slide as many times as they wanted me to. I really can't think of anything too exciting to do but I know they love going to the park and having a picnic so that would be a great memory for them to remember. Eventually, when they were older, I think knowing how I chose to spend my final moments with them would mean a lot. Later in the evening, after I'd put my sons to bed for the last time, I'd probably spend my last few hours writing letters to the friends and family I love. I'd tell them all things I needed to say, should have said and still wanted to say. I'd open my heart and expose every ounce of vulnerability I have. I'd spend all my last minutes pouring out my heart to say all that needed to be said...and hope it's enough.


What about you?

something to ponder....

As a parting thought, Scott always gives me something to think about until we meet again. This session was no different. He left me with an idea recently shared with him that he was still mulling over in his head. At first glance, his immediate reaction to this idea was how wrong it was. Then after a few days of examining it from all sides, he was left scratching his head...still not sure about its validity but unwilling to dismiss it. Oddly enough, I had been introduced to this idea years ago, probably from one spiritual guru or another, and had immediately taken it at face value and agreed with it whole-heartedly. Now I'm not so sure.....


The idea he left me with was that at any given moment, we all do the best we can. Let that sink for a moment. I think most people's immediate reaction is negative because all you have to do is listen to the news to find hundred of examples that contradict that idea. Politicians. Corporations. The Insurance Industry. Our Government. Their Governments. The Education System. Sex scandals in churches and schools. Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing. Racial Profiles. Hate Crimes. We can go on and on before even glancing at our own personal lives. We all have regrets, things we wish we'd done differently, things we are ashamed of. I don't know anyone who is immune from that.


The reason I've always felt comfortable agreeing with this statement is because I have a tendency to look beyond the isolated incident to include a little history of all the players. We all walk through life with our own filters...filters we've developed over time that were influenced by people, situations and consequences of our past... and these filters influence how we react in almost every situation. It's almost like we're each a big ball of yarn made up of dozens of different colored pieces of thread. If you could grab one piece and unravel it to its source, we'd find out when, where and why that particular piece was added to our ball. Maybe a red one came from a teacher in the third grade who encouraged you and set you on a path to be successful or the dark blue one was added when a bully said something that knocked the wind out of you and you never really got it back. Maybe you have a green one that came from a crappy relationship with your parents or a fantastic one. The yellow one might have started winding around your ball while you watched your mom become a doormat for men and you vowed to never fall in that trap or subconsciously allowed yourself to follow in her footsteps. The point is every thread has a beginning, something that left a significant mark on our souls. Some good, some bad, some important, some whimsical...but all included in your brightly colored ball of yarn. 


It seems obvious that every thread in our ball will influence every moment of our lives. When we are deciding whether or not to push forward or fall back, the threads that represent our successes will be called upon. If we are backsliding down the same ol' wrong paths, it's the painful threads probably from our painful childhood or an incredibly hurtful breakup that influence us the most. Because whether these threads are painful or positive, they are so, so familiar. Like a child taken away from an abusive parent, all they really want is to go back because its familiar and they know what to expect and how to handle it.  There aren't many threads representing our marches into the scary unknown because most of the time we avoid it although I suppose there are times when we realize that the unknown might be horrible but it can't possibly be as bad as what we're living in right now so we surge forward with our sabers drawn. Sadly those threads are few and far between.


I think that's why it's always been so easy for me to agree that we're all doing the best we can...but now I'm not sure I still agree with that statement anymore. Obviously if you come to a tough decision with a hundred threads representing hurt, pain, distrust, disrespect and no love and only ten threads that came from positive sources, it's a pretty safe bet that you're going to handle your tough decision badly. You're probably going to go down the exact same path you've walked before and even though you're hell-bent on getting better results, we all know that won't happen. Unfortunately when life throws us tough choices, we don't usually react logically. If we did then we'd never make the wrong choices. But it's not about logic, it's about learned behavior and habit. It's about how we've always chosen to see ourselves and our lives. Like a caste' system, we've learned/decided/agreed that our position in this world is here, at this particular point on the scale. Some people see themselves high on the scale with a lot of value, others are lower with less worth. It all comes from what we learned and what we decided to believe about ourselves. Every decision we make in life, even those tiny insignificant ones are adding threads to our balls of yarn. So if we continue to make the same choices, we'll continue to get the same colored threads added to our ball.


Obviously we can't change our past. We can't remove certain threads that represent darkness and pain. They are permanent pieces of our lives. All we can do is to continue adding threads of happiness, good decisions, choices that were tough to make but the right thing to do, etc. Eventually the good will outweigh the bad and as the ball gets bigger and bigger, the bad threads will disappear under good ones wrapping around and around. There might actually be so many "good" threads on the outside of our balls of yarn that its impossible to see the "bad" threads anymore. The only problem is its really hard to do this when we're stressed out. You're not necessarily thinking clearly when your faced with a tough decision and its almost impossible to analyze and evaluate the pros and cons of each decision in the heat of the moment. Our gut reactions can by pounding us over the head but the comfort of those bad threads seem to win more often than not.


So that brings me back to the question. Are we doing the best we can? No, I don't so and I don't think ever will as long as we wait for life's big decisions and then try to change our stars. It's just too difficult. When you're backed into a corner, you're going to fight your way out the only way you know how. It's definitely not the time to try to learn some new moves. So how do we ever get better? I think the answer lies in the quiet moments between the big tough decisions. It's laying down positive threads with those little decisions that will eventually make you strong enough to notice the bad threads aren't the majority anymore. Don't wait until you have to decide whether to make up and break. In the calmer moments, choose to no longer let him call you hateful names or constantly accuse you of something you haven't done. Choose to fight for yourself and gain your strength every day. Choose to not repeat the little mistakes so you can began to appreciate just how strong you really are. Maybe in the moments between the blowups you'll decide to let go of your obsession with perfection and decide instead to relax and not freak out if there's dishes left in the sink or unfolded clothes on the couch. Whatever it is, there's a thousand different little things that all add up to one big thing and changing all those little things, changes who we are. Changing who we are, changes our filters and changing filters, changes our lives.


So are we all doing the best we can? No, but it is possible to do what we can. And what we can do, is change the little things and then the big things will take care of themselves. And then we'll all be doing the best we can because our filters will be gone and we'll see clearly...maybe for the first time in our lives.

another piece of the puzzle falls into place....

So I had a session with my therapist friend this week. God I just love talking to him. Everyone should go to therapy...it just offers such refreshing angles on your life and really changes your outlook...at least it does if you go in with no defenses and completely open-minded.


Anyway, I told him about my #1 resolution this year...to learn how to fight (argue/disagree) with my family. That raised his eyebrows for a moment but he understood and agreed with me since he knows my family dynamics. I mentioned that at first glance, I thought the problem revolved mostly around my mom, myself and one niece since we have always been life preservers for each other and are deeply involved in each other's lives but then I realized it's an issue my whole family deals with. I have a niece who isn't speaking to another niece right now. Another niece got mad at me and didn't speak to me for years because of something my sister told her..a very twisted form of the truth. Once my sister's oldest daughter came to live with me, my sister cut herself off from me for years. She didn't invite me to her wedding and her only son was around three years old before I met him for the first time. We were back on speaking terms for just a few years before I ended the relationship once and for all. Maybe this is "normal" or a version of normal but the odd thing with all these examples is that they occurred without much conversation...in some cases, none. There wasn't a lot of disagreeing, arguing or fighting. It was mostly just one big ka-boom and the game was over. Everyone in the family acts like I'm the stubborn, unmovable one when I set my mind to something but in reality, we're all that way. We just don't really communicate well and we definitely don't share our feelings...at least not the painful ones.


Then Scott asked a very interesting question. He asked me if I thought this had anything to do with my family's addiction problems. My first thought was that only my brother and sister have had an addiction problem but that's not true. We ALL have either an addiction problem or at least an issue with doing something to excess. Without even straining my brain, I can think of several.....drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping, food/sugar, control, "fixing"... and those are just off the top of my head.


Scott said that if you ignore your feelings, try to stuff them down, pretend you're okay, get over it...if you do any of these things without acknowledging how you really feel, it will come out in one way or another. There's absolutely no way to outrun your true feelings, your hurt, your pain, etc... It can come out in many ways...workaholic, gym rat, control freak, any one of the addictions listed above, OCD, loner.... and so on.  


So what's the moral of the story? What's the moral of MY story? Be honest with yourself..in the moment...experience your feelings...live...be honest with everyone else....breathe and know that disagreeing shouldn't be so hard...it has nothing to do with love. You're not teaching an old dog new tricks...you're just reminding him how to play.

good deeds....

We finally got to have our Christmas with the girls this weekend. Everyone seemed pleased with their presents but the best gift I received didn't come with a bow around it. They had barely gotten into the house when my 14 year old niece announced that she had a gift for me with a grin on her face. She proudly told me about finding a wallet and returning it to its owner. Then my 8 year old niece chimed in with her own good deed story. They both seemed so proud of themselves and they should be.

You don't have to know me well to know I always ask for a small piece of world peace for my birthday and Christmas. I really don't want or need any more stuff, just proof that you're doing your part to make this world a better place. Seeing two of my youngest nieces following through with my request meant the world to me. Don't get me wrong, they are good girls and they would have done the right thing regardless of my request but it sure was nice seeing their smiling faces as the told me about my gifts. Even though I know they do good deeds throughout the year, I suppose by asking them to prove it to me, I'm hoping they'll recognize the opportunities we all over look everyday to improve someone else's life. It's so easy to toss your spare change into a donation bucket at the convenience store and never really think about what a difference your pocket change might make to the person who's picture is on that bucket.

Maybe if we took a few moments to think about the effects of a good deed, we'd do more of them. Let's face it, it's hard not to get a warm and fuzzy feeling when you help someone else...you can't help but feel blessed when you realize how difficult some people's lives are in comparison to yours. So little can do so much.

So somewhere a guy is counting his blessings because a young girl returned his nearly-lost wallet and a little girl is enjoying new clothes bought for her by another little girl just a couple years older than her....priceless...and I got what I wanted for Christmas!

And P.S., I'm still waiting on a few of you who promised me a good deed for my birthday...you know who you are!

The year of change has begun!!!!

and one more little resolution because I just don't have enough already, right?


Have more fun. Simple, silly, belly-laughing fun. Don't pass up the chance to have a "nice" time, a "good" time or a "great" one.


The best part of fun is you don't have to search for it or seek it out...it's right there under our noses all the time.