December 7, 2014

People literally pray for their team to win, or for all the lights to turn green when they’re late for a meeting.  I don’t think it works that way.  I don’t believe the powers that be are spending much time on making sure the minutia in my life is taken care of to my satisfaction.  In fact, I think much of what life hands us is pretty random, because I know lots and lots of wonderful people who could use a break but don’t seem to get many of those.

What are we supposed to make of that?  Of the reality that the luck of the draw isn’t always handing us what we want?  Yet we still have this life we’ve been handed and it needs to be lived.  And hopefully, it will be lived well, in a way that we won’t look back in angst that we blew it.

Byron Katie said one of my favorite things:  “Basically we do three things in life:  we sit, we stand, we lie horizontal.”

To me that means the quality of my life will not be determined by the cost of the chair I sit on, or the celebrity label on the shoes I’m wearing, or by who I know, or even by how easy or hard my life is.

The quality of my life, and of your life, will be determined by how we handle each little experience that life hands us.  So we have a choice.  Meet life with open arms, resisting none of it, or pick and choose what we won’t resist, and live a smaller life than we are meant to live.  As Will Pye says in Blessed With a Brain Tumor, “Of course, failure is inevitable, yet the endeavor generates many magic moments”.

My intention for today is to meet life and embrace it with open arms.  It’s pretty scary.  It’s easy to love the ones who love me, and to embrace the stuff with rainbows and ribbons around it.  I’m talking about embracing it all:  runny nose, annoying neighbor, lost phone, flat tire, stolen purse, tumor diagnosis, stubbed toe, rejecting friend, chosen last for the team, again…and even embracing my resistance–that too.

I’m not trivializing any of it.  Here’s the truth:  if I don’t embrace it, all of it, I still have it.

If I do embrace it, I either free up some creative energy that might pave the way to a solution, or at the very least I’ll be in a better position to respond with some love and a little intelligent imagination :).

Join me?

Much love,