Better Me Epiphany ~ A New Year

We are officially in a new year! Everyone has been asking me what my New Year’s resolutions are for the upcoming year. I responded with a blank stare and a pregnant pause……  I don’t know that I have any right now. This may sound crazy because this year is the perfect time to start over ~ It is chock  full of 1’s. 1/01/11 (Doesn’t this look like a setup for everything to start over?). If you have ever read any of my old posts then you know I fiercely believe in starting over every day, hour, moment, second. We don’t need a calendar full of 1’s or even a sunrise. We have the ability to stop whatever we are doing in that moment and change. I love that idea because it means that we can literally have 86,400 chances to start over every day (that's the number of seconds in a day).

      So I say all of that not to make lightly of the New Year or the New Years resolutions ~ they are grand and wonderful and the most consistent reminder of a new start ~ but I say this all to point out that we don’t have to limit ourselves to that. So many times we resolve to do something in the new year… we mess up.. and then we quit. I put its picture of a spider web up because it is a great reminder to me about new beginnings. Every day that spider laboriously builds it’s web, and every night the dew drops, the wind blows, or a by stander haphazardly walks through it, and it is destroyed. Even the purpose of the web destroys it when a bug gets stuck in it and flails around it messes it up. The spider is continually rebuilding, redoing, and restarting. It takes a lot of dedication, but for the spider it is a matter of survival. So I challenge you and I challenge myself to do the same thing as that spider. persevere like our very survival depends on it ~ because it does. When we mess up, have a setback, walk completely in the opposite direction of where we said we would head, we will not give up. We will simply spin a new web with each new moment and build our lives and our very being into exactly what we set out to do.

Better Me Epiphany: I will remember the web. Destruction is sometimes evident, but it is never the final outcome. My life is what I make it and the chances to change course are only limited by the seconds I have in my lifetime.

Embrace Hopelessness

Today i was rereading a book called "When things fall apart- heart advice for difficult times". It's a book written by Pema Chodron, a buddhist nun. I am a Christian and will always be a Christian but i was still interested to read what she had to say.

In the book there is an entire chapter about embracing hopelessness. She says that to live a life of hope is to continually be unhappy with who and where you are. It's very hard for me to think of hope as a bad thing. I've always considered hope as one of our greatest gifts. It helps us get through tough times because we have a hope for something better. She continues on in the chapter and says that living with the  thought that we will finally get it all together is unrealistic, which I agree with. We are flawed from the beginning, we don't have the human ability to ever be totally perfect. She talks about how hope and fear are intimately related and says that hope comes from us feeling that we lack something... that we are in some sort of poverty. I think that i agree with the idea of being hopeless on a micro scale but not a macro one. As a Christian i believe that i have eternal security and look forward to heaven. I also see the dispair that comes with continually looking ahead. If we spend every moment planning this and planning that, thinking that when i graduate i will be happy, or when i get that job and so on and so on then we miss out on right now. That is where hopelessness is beneficial when we stop looking to the future to satisfy us then we can enjoy today. We can not think about what is to come and completely soak in every moment that we are living. So i encourage you to be hopless in the moment. Don't think about tommorrow or next week. Enjoy your life right now. Everyone knows the saying tommorrow never comes, well i firmly believe that. Live your best life right now!

Better Me Epiphany ~ be hopeless in the moment. Don't worry about who you are becoming enjoy who and where you are. You can still work to become better, just don't wait til you get there to smile.

Posted on the go!