Monthly Archives: January 2013

Aloneness and perspective

Posted by heather b in contemplation, daily life, gratitude, parenting and tagged with , , ,

This morning I was cherishing being alone in our house. I actually like to be alone. I like the quiet, the stillness, the time to think and just be. With three school age children, a husband, a part-time job and the all the other normal aspects of a busy life, my life does not always offer times for me to be alone. So I was enjoying having time to myself and not having anyone there to make any demands of me or my time. But I started thinking about what if I were truly alone. What if I didn’t have the backdrop that three children would come home to me this afternoon, that my husband would return from his business trip this evening, that I could call a friend if I had been in need of company? Under a different set of circumstances, the exact same situation-the one the I was cherishing- could actually have been a situation of sadness and emptiness for me. So, in some sense, how we feel about an event or a situation is relative.

How many other events in our life can this sentiment pertain to? Think of how our mindset, our expectations and our circumstances can invoke different feelings for the exact same event. Parenting provides some obvious examples of this for me. When we are not rushed to be somewhere and not feeling pulled to be doing something else, we too can delight in the unplanned moments of wonder and discovery that occur with our children on a regular basis. But if we’re running late or have something else that we feel we really need to be doing, those stalled moments, where the task at hand falls by the wayside, can be frustrating and troublesome.

For me, sometimes I need to realize that things don’t always present themselves in my life at the most opportune or convenient time; to be open to their occurrence and be able to find the connection, or the joy or the lesson for me in that moment is my work. And in those rare moments where a desired situation does arise at an opportune time, I will continue to celebrate!

Risk and regret

Posted by heather b in being well, daily life and tagged with , , ,

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my risk aversion and what it has meant in my life, and on the flip side, about others who have no qualms with risk and what it has meant for how they live their lives. I’ve realized that security is important to me- physical security, financial security, secure relationships, etc. These are all important aspects of living a fulfilling life, as long as they are not taken to the extreme. In the Christian faith, we ask forgiveness for both the things we’ve done and the things we’ve left undone. This can be applied to the things we’ve done or haven’t done to/for others, as well as ourselves. Things left undone has been the much bigger issue for me than things done. And honestly, until recently, I’ve always thought that it was a better place to be, because rarely had I intentionally hurt someone else or myself. But perhaps this is not a better place. If you want to live a full and intentional life, you have to take some risks, and you can’t easily default to “no, I won’t do _____ because I am not sure how it will turn out” or “no, I can’t do _______ because don’t want to make a mistake (or fail)”. Sometimes, this is where my risk aversion has left me, with fine opportunities that I could have seized upon and didn’t. Part of my risk aversion has come from not listening to or trusting my inner voice, which would have included looking closely at how I felt about something, rather than just weighing the hard fact pros and cons (which generally led me down the road to over-analyzation). While I wasn’t comfortable with the notion of having to regret something that I had done, I downplayed the feelings that could come from regretting something that I hadn’t done.

This is not to say that every opportunity that comes our way should be taken. Evaluating these opportunities requires discernment. And for my friends who err on the side of not considering risk enough, there may be a different lesson for you here; to consider using the more logical aspects of decision making and not just follow your feeling impulse in any moment. In addition, to realize that actions can have unintended consequences and require trade-offs in our lives that we perhaps wouldn’t be willing to make if we’d thought through those.

As with so many aspects of our lives, we’re left with trying to find balance; balancing the knowledge of who we are and what our default tendencies are, as well as balancing the two sides of the risk spectrum.

holiday post-mortem part 2

Posted by heather b in daily life, Uncategorized and tagged with ,

The holiday season of 2012 has come and gone. I have spent time with various members of my family and tried to give them glimpses of some new pieces of myself and some of my new ideas about the world. The experience reminded me that sometimes it can be hard to be to be a new, different person with those people whom we have spent a large portion of our life with. It’s easy to fall back into an old way of being; and this is not always a bad thing.

A few years ago I met up with one of my college roommates for a girls weekend. We hadn’t seen each other in quite some time, yet it felt like no time had passed. We saw each other as the same people we had been. We didn’t have to negotiate our roles with each other, we already knew which of us would lead in different situations. When we got into the car for the first time that weekend, she drove and I navigated, and that is how we’d done it in college. In some cases, it’s nice not to have to go through a renegotiation process in our relationships and just be how we’ve been before.

But sometimes we want to start anew, in one area or all areas of our relationship. Sometimes we want to show people that we have changed, but we don’t know how to introduce that into the existing relationship. Sometimes we see their reactions to new ideas we have or new pieces of ourselves and we realize that there is a reason that we haven’t been that way with them. And sometimes they react in unexpected new ways themselves, and show us a new piece of themselves.

As we attempt to share our new selves, we also need to recognize when someone else is trying to share their new way of being with us, and be open and curious to it, rather than inherently react negatively to the unexpected. As I attempted to share new pieces of myself with my family, I also noticed that they tried to share new pieces of themselves with me. And I wasn’t always open to it, my initial internal reaction sometimes was negative or judging. I had to remember that it is a two-way street.

In this time of new year’s resolutions, I guess that the best we can do is to keep trying. If our new way of being is important enough to us, we can have the courage to bring it out into to open, and not hide in ourselves of the past. Whether other people react positively or negatively to it, we can still be true to ourselves. We must also allow other people the freedom do the same, and acknowledge and encourage the new pieces of themselves that they reveal to us.