During a SCORE mentoring session the client looked at me
across the table and smiled, then said – “you are living life fully, aren’t
you?” Well, I was a bit dumbfounded. I’m
not usually thinking of this sort of thing, life in general, sure; but living
life fully? That is not a phrase that I would ascribe to me.
No, younger people seem to be doing that quite nicely. Some
of course take wrong turns like most of us do. But actually, following a path
never is certain for the results. We know results will accrue. We just don’t know
what they will be. But that’s the sense of adventure, eh?
So some of us take a path and something unexpected happens.
That is, more accurately, something happens that we did not expect. Sometimes
our expectations are woefully out of focus. But quite often we gain experiences
that enrich our understanding of the world, mostly a better understanding of
our own life!
We all know people who are gloomy and down at the mouth.
Rarely do they utter words of hope and positive attitude. They are ‘poor me’
most of the time and laugh rarely. What a shame.
Some of these people ask for help but that’s all they will
take – help. If you try to heal them, that is, try to make things better so
they can self sustain their living circumstances at a higher level, they rarely
take advantage of such help. If they do we usually find them later in a return
of disastrous events and circumstances. Yet again.
Perhaps we should ask next time they approach us, do you
want help or healing change? My bet is they will chose only the former, not the
latter. An interesting thing to note, right? Not all people want their problems
to be erased.
Why you ask? Well, I think they need the excuse for failure
that doesn’t show up their own failings.
Flaws. We all have them. We don’t want
reminding of them. We prefer to think life dealt us a bad deal and thus I am
not responsible for it. But I am, and so are you and the person is
chronically in trouble.
We each must take responsibility for our own circumstances.
We can explain it in any way we wish, but the bottom line is we can do
something about our circumstances. At the very least we can accept the what and
when and live with it without complaining. We might just learn it isn’t as bad
as we thought. Besides, now we have the time absent complaining to actually do
something constructive to fix our own life.
I wonder what gave me this insight? Maybe because I am bone
tired of gloom, wet weather without a glimpse of the sun? But actually these
conditions help me focus on other things more and thus the brain is exercised
in more productive venues. That’s a good thing. I have discovered positive in
the gloom of wet spring weather.
Now if I could transfer that ability to the seven months of
gloomy winter I might have solved a lot of other problems. I might finally
get over the reality that I don’t have the money to travel to Arizona
and New Mexico
for sunshine. In truth sun is a nice accompaniment to life but it isn’t
absolutely necessary.
Now I get why people like Seattle
and Oregon .
They actually move there and ignore the rain. I’m not that strong. Yet!
May 4, 2016
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