A safe harbor where beliefs are respected and kindness prevails.

Thanksgiving Anew

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Fotolia_51963380_Subscription_Monthly_MIn the last year, my husband lost his last immediate family member. Most years, our Thanksgiving was spent with his parents or sister, and now they are all gone. For a moment, for this first year, that left an empty feeling in us about this holiday…usually so full of family sharing and catching up…and laughter…and good food.

We don’t have children so there is no connection there…and for many who do have children, they start to go off with their spouses families as time goes by…so that isn’t always an available connection that can be counted on.

At first I was sad as I have big emotional expectations for that particular day. It my childhood, it was always a very happy day with no punishment or arguing. It was good to process that not having immediate family to share it with was a real loss, a genuine grief. I started wracking my brain to think of ANYONE we could invite to spend Thanksgiving with us so I could fill my house with the smell of a roasting turkey. But there are some events that must be genuine and can’t be “recreated” with a new cast of characters. So, what to do.

My brother has been going to an in-law’s house for the last several years with a HUGE group of people we didn’t really know. That didn’t feel like something we wanted to do. Technically we are distant family, but that is not the same as being with people who you know, that you have spent years with.

Then it occurred to me that we could go to the local soup kitchen and serve food to the homeless. THAT felt awesome…genuine good feeling…not recreated feelings. I asked my husband and to my surprise he thought that was a good idea! So the energy shifted. The sadness had to be processed to make way for a new light, a new joy. fotolia_23798303_Subscription_L

I think at this holiday time of year it is important to be honest with ourselves so we can move on to a new experience. If it makes you sad, then be honest with yourself about it, then let it go, and think of something NEW to do for this holiday that would make YOU feel good. The idea of serving people who needed a meal felt very, very good.

As it turns out, my brother is going to have Thanksgiving at his house this year, so we have a place to go after all. But even if we hadn’t had that offer, we were ready for a NEW Thanksgiving. Also I happened to see a cooking show about roasting just a turkey breast with gobs of herbed butter under the skin, so I plan to do that the day after Thanksgiving so we can have left over turkey…the BEST turkey!

The important thing about this special day is to be thankful for what ever we have in our lives. It may even be less that what we used to have, or more. But being in a state of gratitude, no matter where you have your meal, or with whom you have it, is really what this day is about…and it feels awesome. Enjoy!

Illness or Just ‘The Way We Are?’

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Fotolia_4917303_Subscription_LThree times in the last week I have woken in the middle of the night and not been able to get back to sleep. I viewed this as a problem…that something was “wrong” with me that needed to be fixed. Oh dear, what should I do? I have had this problem on and off all my life and it seems to come and go…it seems to happen more when I am under stress. Oddly it seems to happen when I have done strenuous exercise during that day. Shouldn’t that make me sleep better?

This morning, as I was doing my regular review of Facebook posts, I found one posted listing an article that states that, up until we lighted our cities, this is the WAY WE SLEPT…in segments! It makes sense that when it got dark, we would go to sleep. Now, we stay up late into the night with our amazing electrical devices keeping us awake and entertained.

Ironically, that is what I turn to when I am awake in the early hours of the morning…the television!

So, in an instant, I went from a lifetime of thinking there was something “wrong”, instead, perhaps I was just doing what the genetics of my body have done for thousands of years!

Wow, erasing a lifetime problem with one Facebook article!

Thank you to the people who did the research and to the person that posted it! Here is the link.

What a HUGE shift in attitude this is for me. It makes me wonder how many other things in my life that I consider “problems” really aren’t. What a giant weight off my shoulders!

We are living in an amazing time of shared knowledge. What we pull out of the ever-growing “collective book of knowledge” depends greatly on our attitude. If you are looking for darkness, surely you will find it. There is more than enough to go around. But, if instead, you BELIEVE that the lighted wisdom is coming through more and more, that is what you will magnetically draw to you. With the state of communication such as it is in this time, you can attract ANY kind of information to you that you BELIEVE you can.

Form follows thought, now more than ever.

Now, I just have to figure out what to do with these middle of the night sessions…and of course that could mean going to sleep earlier too! I need to get enough sleep to be sure, but understanding that this is not an illness gives me a better starting place to find a new way to get enough sleep IN this electronic age. I don’t really want to go back to being a cave person but I do want to operate at my very best.

Friends For Life…Or Not!

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Fotolia_8202612_Subscription_Monthly_MI was having dinner recently with a lifetime friend and he was asking about some people that we both knew many, many years ago. Twice I had to say “We’re not friends any more because ‘bla bla bla’ happened.” By the second time I had to say that in one evening, I started to think there was something wrong with me. I started to think I was too judgmental. So I have been thinking about it ever since.

I very much value the friendship of the person I was talking to. Years have gone by when we have had little or no contact, but we knew each other when we both jumped out of airplanes…by choice (he still does!) There is a certain bond that happens with people who do extreme sports together, a sort of unspoken recognition of each other as a kindred spirit. Now circumstances have made it convenient for us to see each other again so we are catching up on all the missing years, all the missing stories.

In thinking about which friends I keep and which friends I let go of, my rules are pretty simple. And after contemplation, I stand by my guidelines. It really comes down to knowing if they support me, or if they judge me, either openly or passive aggressively. Life is really to short and every day of my life is too valuable to me to be with people who bring my energy down.

If I am to be uplifting to those around me, those that I care about, I owe it to them to keep my energy positive. That is not being selfish, that is being an “energy conservationist!” After I am with a friend, I measure how I feel. If I feel:

  • Good about myself and them
  • Energized by the conversation
  • Encouraged about a project I am working on I shared with them
  • Happy to be alive
  • Happy that I know them

Then that is a good, even great friend to spend time with.

However, if after a visit with a friend, I:

  • Am drained energetically
  • Doubt myself
  • Am irritable
  • Am Jealous
  • Find myself in a bad mood

Then something has not been good about that exchange.

I don’t mean that if you have one bad day with a friend you must drop them! No, it is a conclusion that one comes to after MANY encounters. I am sure I have been a drain on friends at times, and some of my best friends need uplifting when they are down…that is just what friends do…good friends.

So how do you know when to let go? There is no time frame that can be given, but at some point, a light bulb just goes off in your head and you just KNOW. If you have given it your best and the relationship stays in the same old pattern that doesn’t serve you, then it is time to move away…and not feel guilty about it.

So I forgive myself for not holding on to every single friend I have ever had, and I truly cherish the wonderful beings that I still have the privilege of knowing! I am lucky that I still have many of those!

The Life Cycle Of A Baby Boomer

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I was born in the Fall of 1946, which makes me one of the first souls to incarnate after World War II. Every generation has a unique place in history, but I believe there has never been a single generation that has experienced as much change as we have, and I LOVE how we have handled it!

If we look back at the average life expectancy just one hundred years ago, it was 52 years for men and 56.8 years for women. Today, it is 76.2 years for men and 81.1 for women! So even if change were happening at the same pace it was a century ago, we would have even more change to adapt to because we are living so much longer. But, of course, the pace of change is nowhere close to what it was in the last couple of centuries.

According to an article published by “Industry Tap,” the total amount of knowable information is “doubling every 12 months, soon to be every 12 hours! … Buckminster Fuller created the ‘Knowledge Doubling Curve;’ he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years.”

Does that scare you!

It shouldn’t because we baby boomers have had a big advantage in coping with this change. For the majority of us, our childhoods were protected from war, hunger and disease in our homeland. We were given television, bicycles, comic books, ice cream, swimming pools and Disneyland for entertainment, along with libraries full of books, playgrounds that were safe and schools where we could go as far as we wanted because college was affordable. For most of us, mom was there in the kitchen cooking dinner when we came home from school. Bottom line … we were able to grow up with optimism.

In our 20s, most of us got practical and started careers. We were able to purchase our own homes and cars, take fun vacations and work reasonable hours with reasonable security, especially if you worked for a large company. We had families, and they too, for the most part, got to live the good life … although for them most moms went off to work during the day, for we were now ushering in the women’s rights revolution. Women wanted careers too, being optimistic that they could do it all, and that they had the right to express themselves in leadership positions at work while remaining “mom” at home.

Things started to get stressful because it was hard for families to really do that, and even harder for men and women to make the adjustments in their relationships. And then came the technical/information age revolution … right in the middle of our careers! But our optimistic attitudes born out of our comfortable childhoods carried us through. We were confident we could learn these new things, and we were excited about participating in this knowledge frontier.

Unfortunately, at the end of our careers, a lot of the security we experienced most of our lives started to shatter with the recession. Times truly have been stressful, especially now that we are really part of the global community, and every day we see the horrors around the world.

We long for the “good old days” of our childhoods.

The good news is that in most of us that optimism has survived and is thriving and can hopefully help generations to follow to learn about the importance of attitude. “Your attitude is your latitude,” a Canadian in his 20s named Rob said to me … and I have lived by that ever since. And we have learned tools to cope with stress, such as meditation and yoga.

For the generations born in the 70s, listen to our positive experiences. For the generations born in the 90s, learn to adapt without fear. You are the ones we are counting on to carry us through this world-changing at lightning speed … especially because we are going to live to be really really old, we need you to stay positive! Learn from our optimism. It was the gift given to our generation, and teaching it is our opportunity to help you cope with a world we cannot even imagine.

So boomers, I ask that you be grateful for the blessed lives we were given and find ways to help guide the younger ones … with optimism. It is truly the greatest gift you have to share. We all have the opportunity to interact with generations other than our own, so how can we make the most of those interactions?

For baby boomers, share the stories of our youth when we believed anything was possible. We shot for the moon … and landed on it! We had to believe that was possible to make it happen, and we did. We actually gave birth to the computer generation that has shifted the world. We explored space, the deep oceans and the human personality without fear. So when you see a younger person doubting what they can do, remind them that television didn’t even exist when we were born! We looked forward to all the technological advances as wondrous events in our amazing lives.

For younger generations, hold onto your vision of a better world and what you can do to make it happen. When you hear “That’s impossible,” be polite but walk away. In our youth, we had NO idea what we would accomplish in our lifetimes. The same is true for you, but even more so. Follow your passion and “knowingness” about what can be done. Our generation helped make the shift up from the industrial revolution to the information age … that is the gift of our time. We can’t WAIT to see what you shift us up to!

And remember, “Your attitude is your latitude!”

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