A safe harbor where beliefs are respected and kindness prevails.

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!”

Still Searching For Rainbows

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glassofrainbowWe are all being challenged at the moment to stay positive no matter how things appear around us. This attitude, this looking at the glass half full, is what will carry us through these times of change.

So, picture a glass half full, with a rainbow ending right in it!

Too Pollyanna for you? Well just try it. Get a photo of a rainbow and put it behind a glass of water, half full! What does that do for you…well at least it should be worth a chuckle! It would be even funnier if someone came in and caught you doing it…caught you looking for the rainbow in the half full glass!

I ask you to wonder, are we all a bit afraid to show optimism now? When so many have lost so much, all over the world? Perhaps just a little. Sometimes expressing optimism activates a tirade from someone you know, someone who you care about. Fear of that can perhaps cause us to be reluctant to express it.

If that is how you sometimes feel, then become a closet optimist on those days!

People will sense the positive energy coming from you. Even if you don’t share WORDS of optimism, if you spend a little time each morning thinking about:

  • Something you are grateful for in your life
  • Something you dream might happen to you (like winning the lottery!)
  • Appreciating what you have, not what you don’t have
  • Appreciating the friends that you do have (even if they are glass half empty people)
  • Appreciating the weather if it is good, or the farmers market if you can go, or the phone call you got from someone you wanted to talk to …

You get the idea. Then don’t share it with anyone but see if you light up the faces of the people you encounter during the day…even just a tiny little bit … just by emanating a slightly more positive energy. If they don’t smile when they see you, it may be something going on with them…you don’t always get a “sign” that you are shining positive energy. In fact, sometimes it can really irritate people to see you happy when they are not.

But do it anyway.

You may help that person without their realizing it. You may help them question why they are irritated with your happiness. You may shift their energy up just a tiny bit. You can’t be “positive” because you want proof that you are a good person. You just have to do it because it feels good to you and hopefully feels good to those you encounter during the day.

Keep it in the closet if you like, but open up the door just enough to let that rainbow in! Oh, and then drink the water!

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