An insightful turn of phrase...

Among the many colorful, yet perceptive and astute phrases Gabriel García Márquez uses, this one found its mark inside of me.

In his book, Love in the Time of Cholera, when talking about the President of the Board of Directors and General Manager of the River Company of the Caribbean, Don Leo XII Loayza, to whom the lovesick Florentino Ariza goes for a job says that at first he was very angry...

".....but he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."

This, I thought was a fitting response to when we are tempted to say, think, feel - oh, this is the way I am; life has made me this way; this is my DNA or genetic pattern; this is what my life is all about...and other such phrases, to absolve ourselves from making the effort and finding the energy to lift ourselves up. To all of these I find  Márquez's words so uplifting.....never mind my genetic pattern, never mind this is how I always react, or this is how life has made me.....No, and again NO. We have to give birth to ourselves every time life's road, for better or for worse, takes a twist or a turn, hits a speed bump, or causes us to have an accident. Yes, even when things are better, we have to give birth to ourselves so that we can enjoy the lovely gift without rancor ( though it may be easier to stay steeped in self-pity). Of course when things go the other way, then we have to give birth to ourselves to be able to overcome the adversity (and not groan and moan about the unfairness of life).

Life requires us to give birth to ourselves in all situations, simply because we CAN...

It is, to my mind...

 the worst possible thing to make yourself an object of sympathy.....and worse than that is to try and get mileage out of playing the wronged/unjustly treated person. Even if you have what you think is the least of things, you are still better off than the person who does not have even that. Importantly, we all have hidden talents - something will surface if you allow yourself to trust in yourself - if you face each day with gratitude and the belief that you CAN do something....If not, while still able, you will be dependent on the kindness and mercy of others, which you can rest assured is a painful place to be...

Things I learnt today from...

Iyanla Vanzant

Why not give ourselves only good things?
Why not? Why can we not believe that we can give ourselves only good things...

It is when we lack faith in ourselves and in the goodness of life that we settle for less.
Settling for less has probably become a part of our psyche...

Answers to these will show us how far we have gone in settling for less-

Do we accept bad behavior, excuse broken promises, accommodate people who take more than they give?
Are we susceptible to outside influences and settle for what others convince us is the 'right thing to do'?
Do we rationalize away the tasteless jokes, the hurtful words, the hateful conditions at work, the cruelty of people......?

The upside is that once we realize this, we can begin to believe that, in fact, we can have what we really want...

Start by making one new choice a day...a choice that is YOU - it's hard work, but will be very, very rewarding....and be sure to say a Thank You for every little thing that you do that makes you feel YOU...

Have been away...

for a long, long time...

Feel I'm beginning to surface after being deluged by problems, heartaches, and various issues.

To start me on my way again, Life threw this at me this morning:

“You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”
~Michael Jordan

It is the "You have to expect things of yourself" that has caught me....caught in the maelstrom of life, I think all that thrashing around took the juice out of me and out of my life.

Going to get it back!

I don't know why...

I am suddenly assailed by all kinds of doubts and regrets.

Chief of these is my inability to put into words my feelings about the loss of my mother. As I've mentioned before, since I didn't see my beloved Dad (he was also an extremely important presence in the life of my DD) interred, to me he is still around....but Mom was different - I saw her suffer - a lot of it because of her stubbornness - but suffer she did, and badly...

I was comforted by these words:

A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That’s what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.

When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. 

Grief requires acquainting yourself with the world again and again; each “first” causes a break that must be reset… And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.

It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative.....it's like a tree growing around an obstruction.

Taken from 'In The Long Goodbye' - Meghan O'Rourke's magnificent memoir of grieving her mother's death. In this book, she crafts a masterwork of remembrance and reflection.

It is in the presence of death...

especially of those we love - that we come face to face with our own mortality...

Laws are something you merely obey...

Values are something you feel.
~ Edward Slingerland

This really clarifies things for me. Not the laws part - of course laws are to be obeyed, or if you know the laws well, they can be broken, or well, they can be broken anyway...

But what Slingerland says about values made me sit up straight. There are many ways in which 'values' are explained...I seem to get stuck every now and again in one or the other of these explanations. This one spells it out loud and clear - it is what we feel - so if we don't feel good, obviously that is not for us, and if we do feel good, then, wow, it can work for us....The key words are how you - the person - feels.