I Was The One I Was Looking For All Along

The two silver oversized balloons she carried out of the party store meant someone special was having a birthday. A big birthday as indicated by the helium-filled “5” and “0” she held tightly as she made her way across the parking lot.

I don’t remember the specific details of the exact day I turned the Big 5-0. But little did I know it would be the first day of my most significant decade of personal growth and transformation.

A milestone birthday can serve as a catalyst for change, but me turning 50 felt more like an extension of being 49. The odometer marking the miles of my life may have turned over, but I was still traveling the same road at the same pace, a road with many miles behind me and hopefully many more in front of me. Same road, same view, just another year older.

Hardly a catalyst.

The real catalyst was a growing sense of inner frustration. Nothing in particular, more of a general level of discontent and misalignment which peaked by the middle of the decade.

I’d always carried a silent frustration within me. Life was something I’d often struggle to understand as well as my place in it. The outside world never saw that side, a side whose voice I was quite good at repressing. In time I learned such a powerful voice can never be fully silenced and as I approached birthday number 55 that voice had become more determined to be heard. It grew louder, more persistent, at times even hostile. It had something to tell me and it was going to get me to notice.

Life does have a way of getting your attention, doesn’t it? At first the hints are subtle, slight Continue reading “I Was The One I Was Looking For All Along” →

Granting Grace In Your Moments Of Darkness

“Be aware of what season you are in and give yourself the grace to be there.” — Kristen Dalton

The annual traffic jam the departing Cape Cod tourists create on Labor Day weekend is a regionally accepted symbol of the unofficial end of summer. Life reverts to the life we so often work to escape, even if for just a little while.

Inevitably seasons change. And while nature offers a predictable schedule for her seasons, life’s seasons have a seemingly random time frame of their own.

As humans we’ve all experienced seasons of abundance, of loss, of growth, of stagnation, of community, of isolation, of clarity, of confusion. Some seasons I’ve wanted to last forever, others seasons have felt like they’d never end.

I often struggled in those unwanted seasons of loss, stagnation, isolation, and confusion. I didn’t understand why I kept finding myself in such darkness, angry at God for putting me in such a hole, and cursing Him for keeping me there.

Graceful I certainly wasn’t.

Maybe that’s why I spent so much time there?

The wisdom found in age changed my relationship with life’s seasons. I may still not know why I find myself dealing with the ones I’d rather not have to deal with, but having been Continue reading “Granting Grace In Your Moments Of Darkness” →

When Nothing Has To Be Anything Other Than It Is

That’s the elusive sweet spot.

No resistance, no forcing, no needing, no grasping.

Accepting without resentment or expectation.

Flowing without forcing.

Trusting the process, the unfolding.

Acceptance is not a passive undertaking by any means. It’s a conscious and intentional decision to see things as they are, even if you might not like what you see.

It isn’t easy getting to such a peaceful place.

It’s quite difficult staying there when you do.

But when you know where you really are, it’s much easier to get where you’re going.

Photo by Maxime Doré on Unsplash

Finding Your Own Road Less Traveled

If you didn’t know it was there you’d probably never know it was.

The paved road unexpectedly turned to gravel. The overgrown grass and trees hid the sign marking the entrance to a rather obscure area of the vast coastal nature preserve. I parked where I could looking for signs that didn’t exist. Google Maps gave me an idea where I was supposed to go, and with my backpack and hiking stick I headed west down the fire road which I believed would lead me to the beach I was looking for.

About a mile later the dirt road lined with scrub pine turned into sand and behind the grass-covered dunes was the beach I was looking for.

Perfectly empty.

Just me and the ocean.

I can see why many wouldn’t want to go through such a process just to get to a beach. A few miles Continue reading “Finding Your Own Road Less Traveled” →

The Peaceful Co-Existence Of The Destination & The Journey

The mind is quite powerful, isn’t it? It can create things outside of reality yet we still willingly embrace them as real.

I can at times find myself standing at the base of mountains only I can see. Mountains of my own fear-based creation in the form of perceived challenges and obstacles I accept to be real standing before me. There are things to attain and achieve, needed outcomes to set me free, yet somehow I have the ability to complicate my own journey forward by painting images of those emotional mountains in my head.

I’m quite experienced at navigating such ascents. In fact I’ve climbed some of these same mountains several times, usually frustrated by the need to climb them yet again. Frustrated with every step forward. Not understanding why I need to retrace my steps yet again.

The present moment sounds like a wonderful place to be, but I’ve spent very little time living there. I’ve always been more about the destination than the journey, a mindset engrained from an early age that there is always more to do and every moment basking in “what is” is one moment that should have been used marching towards some ever-elusive destination.

A destination driven mindset leaves little room to appreciate the present moments of the journey. There is always somewhere else to be other than the here and the now.

Most of my “inner work” of late has been focused on being at peace with “what is”. And when I find I am once again frustratedly standing at the base of one of those mountains I create in my mind, I am reminded that I still have more work to do. As has been said, “the lessons will continue until the lesson is learned”, which is why, despite my “inner work”, I can still at times find myself with a mountain before me.

A mountain of my own creation.

A mountain which need not exist.

It can be a very uncomfortable space, the present moment. Especially if you’ve spent most of your life running away from “what is”. But in my willingness to stay with it, the discomfort has slowly diminished and I’ve gradually experienced the promised peace attributed to the present moment.

In the clarity of the present moment I can see the mountains for what they actually are.

One thing I’ve learned about mountains is that you don’t have to climb them if they don’t exist. Just because I’ve habitually created them doesn’t mean I need to continue to do so.

There are still goals to achieve and outcomes I desire, but the urgency of their completion has been replaced with the consistency of present action. Of not being fearfully overpowered with the vastness and necessity of what’s in front of me and instead showing up fully one moment at a time, embracing the vision without being overwhelmed by it all.

More trust. More flow.

The destination and the journey now peacefully co-exisiting within me.

Photo by Amanda Sandlin on Unsplash

Moving Forward When We Don’t Want To Move At All

Sometimes the heavy days win. The weight of it all eventually buckling your emotional knees and all you want to do is get through it. Recoil. Ride the storm out.

Sometimes the storms within us rage far longer than we expect them to. Survival becomes the priority and in such a mode we often keep our heads down and playing small. In the face of the waves crashing upon us, it feels like the safest option.

But it’s not the only one.

Sometimes I get tired of being resilient, of pushing the same rock up the same hill, of having to rise above situations I did not create but impact me none the less. Sometimes I get tired of clearing such emotional rubble out of the way blocking my path forward. Sometimes I do catch myself with my head down and playing small.

It shows up in my energy and my actions. I notice the things I don’t want to do, the conversations I don’t want to have, my disinterest and indifference and apathetic efforts to do anything Continue reading “Moving Forward When We Don’t Want To Move At All” →

Elevators Or Perpetuators?

8 billion people on this Earth and the vast majority of them fall into one of two groups.

Elevators or Perpetuators.

Those who will lift us up. Those who will keep us stuck.

There are far more people willing to keep us stuck.

Elevators are the rare ones. They’re the ones who know who we are and continuously support where we are going. Perpetuators would rather have us stay exactly where we already are, and if we let them influence us that’s exactly where we’ll stay.

The people we willingly surround ourselves with directly impact the trajectory of our life.

Some will lift us up.

Some will keep us stuck.

Elevators or Perpetuators.

Chose wisely.

Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash

Moving Past The Old Familiar Sting

On the sidewalk of a small strip mall I noticed a sandwich board sign in front of a liquor store. “Beer doesn’t ask silly questions. Beer understands”. Google “words of wisdom” and it’s highly unlikely that those words printed on that sign would ever come back in the search results.

Perhaps they should.

As someone who endured a rather intense 18 year “relationship” with beer, those words on the sign struck me deeper than I expected them to. Because I know them to be true. Beer was a loyal friend, very predictable, and always took me where I needed to go, unconditionally. Even if where I was going was detrimental to myself. It didn’t question or evaluate what I needed from the relationship. It had a purpose to serve and that’s exactly what it did.

There is something powerfully reaffirming when you feel understood. When you have nothing to justify nor defend. When you’re simply accepted as is. Familiarity provides an intoxicating comfort, even if what’s familiar is undermining your own emotional well being.

Growing beyond the familiar is quite uncomfortable. Alcohol made it easy for me to not have to deal with my own deeper issues, the things on some level I knew I needed to work through but I never had the courage or willingness to do. I decided to stay stuck in the familiar instead of embracing the uncertainty of growth.

Growth asks way too many questions.

In the hauntingly beautiful song “Hurt”, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails speaks of “the old familiar sting”, widely accepted as a reference to substance abuse, though others have interpreted this line Continue reading “Moving Past The Old Familiar Sting” →

Urgency, Clarity, Intention, & Purpose

Her text brought an unexpected smile to my face.

It’s July 4th and my younger sister reached out with a memory of the day we celebrated America’s bicentennial. Our ever-crafty Mom baked a couple dozen cupcakes and us neighborhood kids got to decorate them with the red, white, and blue frosting she made. We all got together by the old fence separating our yard from Dave Wooler’s yard and expressed our patriotic spirit in a very sweet way.

I had forgotten all about that day but her text brought me right back into that moment. The faces, the voices…hard to believe it was 50 years ago.

Revisiting memories is often a double-edged emotional sword for me. Inevitably I will move past the memory itself and find myself fixated on the time separating the memory and the now. As in what have I done with my life in those years in between. As much as I’ve come to accept the path my life has taken, that nagging and quite persistent inquisitive voice within has the tendency to prompt me to revisit my path. The choices I made. The choices I didn’t make. The choices I never allowed myself to make.

Quite often this line of questioning was met with a tenacious hostile reaction from within, sort of the same reaction I experienced when I felt short of the paternal expectations I wasn’t living up to. I should have done better, and not knowing what better actually was didn’t let me off the hook for not doing Continue reading “Urgency, Clarity, Intention, & Purpose” →

Maybe I Am The Problem

I wasn’t aware of the Soup Rule.

Standing in line at Panera and the person in front of me was tormented with indecision trying to decide what to order for lunch. Her painful deadlock was eventually resolved when she determined that it was too hot for soup and ordered the sandwich instead.

Yes, it certainly was hot that day, and apparently the high heat disqualified soup from lunch contention.

I like soup. I just never knew there were parameters limiting its availability for consumption.

I’m not sure how rules like this get started, but at some point she accepted the elevated reading on the outdoor thermometer as a valid reason to limit her dining options. For me, if I want soup I’ll have soup regardless of the weather conditions. But the more I thought about this, I realized for me this was no longer about the soup. This morphed into me starting to examine the limiting parameters I may have placed upon myself.

As I ate my lunch, I thought about my own rules, the guiding parameters and nuances I’ve willingly accepted in my life. The beliefs and ideals that influence the habits and actions which shape my life. Some were my cultural and tribal inheritance, others I created for myself. Taking inventory of your own beliefs and ideals provides you with the opportunity to evaluate them. Which ones serve you? Which ones no longer do? Which ones never did? Which ones are you willing to let go of?

My beliefs and ideals have given me the life I have, a life I am infinitely grateful to have. Life, though, is a never ending work in progress, ever evolving in front of us. As I continue to grow and evolve, am I allowing my beliefs and ideals to grow and evolve with me?

Or is what I accept that I am holding me back from becoming who I was created to be?

Photo by Juan Miranda Ferris on Unsplash

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Lessons From A Life Unfolding