What’s your excuse?

Summer has been my excuse for not writing daily, or so it seems. The only problem with that is my minds thoughts and ideas haven’t taken the same break, producing within me a feeling of guilt and not living fully in the moment. I’ve realized all along that writing was a great vehicle for me to express my authenticity and truth, and by sharing openly I was doing my part in bringing hope and a sense of normalcy to a world in need of both. I’ve also realized that it takes significant effort and time to do so.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, perhaps you have, perhaps you are doing the same thing, perhaps its a good thing, perhaps its a bad thing, perhaps it doesn’t really matter, perhaps it matters. Perhaps its all of the above. I believe that we experience all of these ideas in life, generating fear, peace, indifference, love, etc. It is a fundamental reality of human existence.

I also believe that as we live our lives, we store the history of fear and angst and we store the history of love and peace caused by our reactions to events and the feelings created by those experiences. Those experiences can cause us to be critical, cause us to question, cause us to get stuck in self doubt, and conversely cause us to expect and chase love and peace in our lives. Living is tough work.

Quite often in life’s events, we can find ourselves ill-prepared to deal with these events emotionally. When this happens these emotional experiences and feelings get added, (recorded) to our history. They become part of who we think we are, and the baggage we drag through our existence. It can shut down our ability to feel, it can cause behavior and emotional instability so difficult to handle we need to fill the void with drugs, hurtful behaviors and situations. No need to give any more examples here, just take a look around.

The solution I feel we need to consider is practicing gratitude. You’ve all heard about the sentiment of gratitude, we all know about it, but do we practice it? It’s hard sometimes because life’s hard sometimes and we carry a history of feelings and experiences that affect our behavior. There are days that I don’t even realize I’m depressed and I don’t know why. Now, I know that my feelings of depression, despair, unworthiness etc. are probably just part of the baggage I’ve been dragging around. By knowing that, I can set it down, put it aside for a moment and turn my attention to where the good is happening around me. I can alter my direction and adjust my feelings (we all can do this). At first its hard and uncomfortable, it requires practice and if the truth be known, I want it to be easy.

“Blessings on your journey”

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