Dear Reader:

Haven’t we all experienced a time when we catch a glimpse of ourselves in a store front window or even the rear view mirror of our car… and for a moment don’t  recognize our own reflection?

It is a pretty sobering moment. Especially when we later have a minute to reflect on the incident and suddenly realize that it is not the physical reflection that threw us… but the missing “soul–ful” being within and beyond facial recognition.

What has happened to  the person we were supposed to be? Throughout our lives we play different roles….son, father, husband,  breadwinner, job identification, coach, grandfather…or daughter, mother, wife, breadwinner, job identification, teacher, and /or grandmother.

We have certainly been busy…but in our busyness somehow we lost our “forever selves”…the spirit of the person we were destined to be. We forgot to get off the main, crowded highway to  detour  the back roads of life…where living slows down long enough to find the real us underneath all the role-playing.

Psychologists  call this phenomenon a “displacement of self.” It usually occurs during times of great stress and we can certainly  concur 2020 provided enough stress for everyone to go around.

In her latest book Unresolved… Glennon Doyle has this quote that hit home to a lot of readers, including me.

*“If you are uncomfortable — in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused — you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.”

Consider the truth in Doyle’s quote…I did.

For example…I remember as a child, a student, a teacher, a wife and  mother…..thinking that if I just tried harder, whether in school or my job or relationships…that life would get easier because I had learned to perfect all the obstacles in each category of life.

But I was wrong…quite wrong. Life wasn’t designed to be perfect…it is in the daily challenges, set-backs, and losses that the most beautiful moments of our lives are resurrected and we start living the life of the person we were destined to be.

This other following quote from Doye’s book really made me stop in my tracks…

“What scares me more than feeling it all, is missing it all.”

As scattered as our feelings are these days on so many pressing topics… we should still feel  fortunate to be a part of life…even with all the mixed feelings that accompany it…much preferable to no longer having any feelings left in us because our “forever self” has gone missing and we never started living the life we were meant to live.

So until tomorrow…

“We can do hard things.”

And even though we women prefer stopping to ask directions in lieu of continued wandering…(“counter-intuitive” to our male counterparts :)…we too must remember…

“This life is ours alone. So we should stop asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.”  (We each have our own separate places to discover and finally call home.)

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

If we took time to create our own life map today…we would realize that certain daily incidents (that we never gave a second thought to while they were happening) were actually  map signs, being constantly created… pointing us in the right direction based on our individual interests, personality, and inner light.

As we age isn’t it easier, in hindsight, to recognize the destination benchmarks that turned us around and set us on new paths to find our “forever selves.” Now the question is…Did we follow these new paths or did we cave and follow the “herd” instead?

It’s never too late…your “forever you” still waits your arrival.

*Wanda is still weak and even just trying to eat throws her oxygen numbers off…so let’s keep those prayers coming.

*Also keep Suzy, Gin-g’s sister, in our continued prayers as she resumes with more tests to determine her individual plan for fighting her cancer. Thank you.

I am in the midst of starting to take Christmas down…(now that can be a real “downer”)… I am already starting to miss Santa’s Workshop...I am pretty tired after all the climbing and lugging…kinda like little Winnie! 🙂