Ahhhh. Rainforest Nut Green Mountain Coffee.
It’s the first full day of summer vacation (for the boys), and the sun has not come out as the weatherman promised. Not cool. I have a feeling of entitlement around this. The sun should come out because, after a long year of nonstop learning, my kids deserve it. Okay, full disclosure: I feel *I* deserve it! I sit in an office with no windows M-F and sometimes Saturday, which is mostly fine on rainy, stormy, snowy days, but SUMMER is when I really miss being a SAHM. I miss things that used to mean summer to me and the boys: homemade popsicles, clothesline dried sheets, and sitting outside with a book while they played on the swingset and in the sandbox. I miss hiking. And climbing mountains. The only mountain I have climbed in the past 225 Saturdays is in the basement on the floor next to the washing machine. Last summer, my mother gave us a state park pass as a holiday gift, and I made it My Summer Mission to use that thing as often as possible. I would get off work at 4:00pm, and we could be at the lake by 5:30 for an evening picnic and swim. We made it to a beach a few times a week, at least for a few hours, and it was wonderful! The kids were relaxed and happy. I was suntanned from the actual sun, not bronzing lotion! I hoped for another summer like that, but I’m in a different job now, and I don’t get home a minute before 6:00 now, and I am beat. We might still make it to the lake for an occasional swim and picnic, but the weekends are all the summer I can look forward to this year. SO PLEASE COME OUT FATHER SUN! MY FAMILY REALLY DIGS YOU!
This past few months, I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction. Whenever I’m writing a brand new project, I have to stop reading fiction altogether for awhile, or else I lose focus on my story. Right now, I am loving the following book by Debbie Ford:
If you have never read anything by this woman before, she is a super powerful motivator, encouraging people to find inner peace and strength by getting kind of radical about self-acceptance, and therefore “other” acceptance. She teaches from the foundational concept that we’re all One, that every person in your life is a reflection of you, that every person has every quality inside themselves, even those they abhor in others. And the qualities they abhor in others are actually hints as to what they most dislike about themselves. Now people are usually happy to see those they think are cool as reflections of themselves. But not so with people they dislike. I initially fought the idea myself, but it gets easier over time to go there. Like most people, I try to deny or suppress my less desirable or “shadow” qualities by pushing them down, or stuffing them, so that no one can see them, but it’s like trying to hold a buoy under water…eventually that sh*t’s going to pop up. And how you feel about that quality in yourself is going to run your life when it does. When qualities you’ve spent your entire life suppressing come to the surface, the result is catastrophic to your relationship with yourself, and therefore, with others. Because we see others as a reflection of ourselves.
The Courage book is really cool because it’s about nailing down where your personal fear comes from. Because fear is the block to courage, and by identifying it, we can start to identify where we let it get in our way and make a conscious choice to do differently. I think this is interesting because there’s seems to be a huge focus on fear-busting in our culture. Like fear is the enemy and we gotta get rid of it or something. Well, some fears, you might be able to kick to the curb. But some fears are completely reasonable. Fear is a powerful indicator that your in danger. Or that your on the wrong path. The way Debbie Ford tells it, you can’t kick fear out of your life. You have to learn to live with it. Like your shadow side, you have to get to know it, treat it nicely, and USE it, or it will use YOU. Like all shadow attributes, when you find it and apply love and compassion, it becomes the opposite. It becomes courage. True courage comes not from being fearless, but from knowing your fear and where it comes from and that it’s an illusion. I personally think we could all use a little more courage in our lives. Don’t you?
Have a great weekend!
