Tag: hope

Smackin’ The Piñata Of Life

Smackin’ The Piñata Of Life

There’s a pony hanging from a hook above my desk. It’s small, colorful, and made out of whatever a piñata is made out of. It’s there to remind me of one of life’s most important lessons.

I remember the many birthday parties, rope thrown over a low-hanging branch holding the piñata in position for the kids lined up to take a few swings at in hopes of cracking the thing wide open and spewing candy all over the ground at the base of the tree.

The life lesson?

The candy doesn’t just fall out by itself.

As grown ups, our candy comes in a different form. It takes the shape of our hopes and dreams and aspirations. The things we want to experience and become. The life we want to live. Those hopes and dreams and aspirations are dangling in front of us. But unless we are willing to line up and take consistent swings at the piñata of life all that we want for ourselves will remain within our sights yet out of our reach.

The piñata above my desk reminds me that the life I want to live needs me to show up, to step up, Continue reading “Smackin’ The Piñata Of Life” →

Finding Your Own Sacred Space To Be You

Finding Your Own Sacred Space To Be You

I didn’t intend it to turn out this way.

But I guess it did.

It’s late 2008 and I’m highly annoyed. The world inside me and around me full of frustration and negativity. At that stage of my life I was quite good at complaining, easily adding my highly opinionated voice to the “somebody should do something” chorus knowing that I would not be the one to try and actually do something to change anything.

But for some reason something told me I should try and do something. My lack of qualifications as a writer was offset with a passionate conviction to try and give positivity a little more visibility in the world.

Especially mine.

15 years ago – April 20, 2009 – I anxiously hit the “Publish” button for the first time and this blog went live. I offered my faint voice of optimism into an increasingly negative and hostile universe.

Posting uplifting quotes gradually lead to me to actually attempting to post original content, again, driven by a desire to add my own voice and share some positivity, hope, and optimism into the lives of those who visited the site. And while the goal was to write for others, writing eventually became something I needed to do for me.

Turns out I needed the same positivity, hope, and optimism I wanted to offer others.

Writing these posts over the years has served as a form of self-therapy. Often posts are birthed out of my attempts to deal with my own frustrations, confusion, and pain life at times creates for us all. The Continue reading “Finding Your Own Sacred Space To Be You” →

Giving Thanks For The Things That Piss Me Off

Thank you, you idiot driver, for driving too slow in the high-speed lane and making me late. Thank you, you inconsiderate grocery shopper, for dumping 20 items on the conveyor belt of the 12-items-or-less express register aisle.

Thank you. For pissing me off.

I’ve come to appreciate such moments, the moments when I am in emotional overdrive with everyone and everything getting under my skin. Why? Because I’ve learned my reaction to the world in front of me says so much about the world inside of me. When my responses are laced with rage and anger and my thoughts and words become confrontational and judgmental, it tells me that real problem here is more about me than with the ones who have managed to push my buttons.

I tell my kids life usually never goes as planned and when it doesn’t what you do next is the important thing. Sometimes I need to take my own advice. Life so often is a test, those moments when life Continue reading “Giving Thanks For The Things That Piss Me Off” →

God’s Night Club And The Velvet Rope of Doubt

Perhaps this has happened to you?

It’s Saturday night and you’re standing in the long line outside the hottest night club in town. There’s the muscle-bound bouncer, dressed in his crisp-yet-slightly-too-small tuxedo, clipboard in his hand. On the clipboard is the guest list with the names of the “important” people, the chosen few who will be escorted directly into the club upon their arrival.

The not-so-important people? They remain queued up in a corral of velvet ropes, anxiously hopeful the man with the muscles and the clipboard will somehow lower the velvet rope and allow them entry as well.

Heck of a way to spend a night.

Hell of a way to spend a life.

Many of us have places we’d like to go in life. Things we’d like to do. Things we’d like to become. But somehow we’re not moving forward. It’s as if Continue reading “God’s Night Club And The Velvet Rope of Doubt” →

Every Day Is The First Day Of Spring

I couldn’t help notice the ugliness, sitting in the drive-thru line waiting to get my morning iced coffee. Winter has finally taken it’s toll on my psyche. As I look around all I see is brown and grey. Barren trees and dead grass. It’s like someone drained all the color out of life. Taking comfort in knowing Spring is less than a week away, I am sustained by it’s promise and expectations.

Spring has always been an uplifting time for me, even during my years of spiritual immaturity. A more enlightened version of me now sees the significance of the season. Rebirth. Renewal. Resurrection.

“To everything there is a season” say the Bible and Pete Seeger. The seasons ebb and flow in and out of our lives on their divine time frame, well outside of our control, each with something to teach us should we make ourselves available to learn.

AWAKENING In each of our lives we experience our own seasons. Seasons of light and seasons of darkness, of sowing and reaping, of laughter and silence. The challenges of life can drop us into our own unscheduled winter, the bitter chill of isolation and uncertainty leaving us emotionally frostbitten.

We may find ourselves in the grasp of such a winter, but how long we stay there is up to us.

Spring is always around the corner.

Spring is a mindset of divine promise and expectations, always readily available should we choose to realign ourselves with our own divine perfection. Any day can be the day of our own rebirth, our own renewal, our own resurrection, regardless of the storms and trials swirling around us at the moment. Spring is available, right here, right now, simply awaiting our decision to claim it.

What in your life is lying dormant, in need of awakening?

The good news is every day is the first day of Spring.

It’s a great day to be you!

How Much of You Will Be Thrown Into The Great Dumpster in the Sky?

I imagine the story would go something like this:

It’s Judgment Day. You have a final interview with God, at which time you need to turn back in any of your unused potential. Any excess capacity that was never utilized. Any unused gifts that were bestowed upon you but simply never used. And I can see God cringe every time he asks to see what’s been left unused. He knows the answer already. Not just because He’s God, but because He knows that the vast majority simply never  live up to the greatness they were designed to achieve. God simply shakes his head as he throws the unused potential into the big rusty steel dumpster behind him.

Continue reading “How Much of You Will Be Thrown Into The Great Dumpster in the Sky?” →

Go Feng Shui Yourself

Rearranging the “furniture” in your mind.

I have a love/hate relationship with painting. I love looking at the myriad of individual paint sample cards. I love the feeling each shade evokes. I love the possibilities. I love how the room will look and feel when the project is completed. Unfortunately, the paint doesn’t get on the walls by itself. That would be the hate part.

Standing in Home Depot’s paint department in front of 100’s of little color samples that offers millions of possible color combinations can be a wee bit overwhelming. For me, perhaps the most difficult part about repainting a room is deciding exactly how I want the room to feel. Cozy? Whimsical? Peaceful? Tranquil? Fun? Color can make any four walls feel exactly how you want them to feel.

We all spend a great deal of time coloring the environment we live in. From the colors in the rooms we dwell in, the furniture in those spaces, the music we listen to, the books we read, the car we drive, the clothes we wear, the friends we keep, we surround Continue reading “Go Feng Shui Yourself” →

The Importance of Being Selfish

Trust me, you want me to be selfish.

And I want you to be selfish, too.

Being selfish doesn’t seem like a good idea. Especially if building community and relationships is important to you. After all, being selfish is about being self-centered. It’s about the “me” and not the “we”. The focus on individual accomplishment and development can’t possibly be beneficial to the collective good of our society.

I disagree.

Continue reading “The Importance of Being Selfish” →

So, What Will You Bring Into The Next Moment?

The Next Moment can redefine us.

Or go obliviously unnoticed. 

It’s all up to us.

So here we stand on the edge of a new moment. Moments, if defined as seconds, happen 86,400 times per day. We move from one moment to the next almost seamlessly, as one moment morphs into the next, and then the next. The busy pace of life today causes us to misplace entire days, let alone notice a single individual moment.

Transitioning between the moments is done without much thought or reflection. As we blindly enter the Next Moment, we bring with us the contents of the previous moment, which contained the contents of the moment prior to that one. Each moment is a clean Continue reading “So, What Will You Bring Into The Next Moment?” →

The Ultimate Pain Killer

I recently had a conversation with a friend I didn’t know was a friend. I had know this person for the past few years on a very casual basis. Neither one of us really knew anything about each other. All I knew was that this person was the kind of person you’d probably like to get to know better.

Never did I expect one simple question to dramatically impact me so profoundly.

It wasn’t so much the question itself, it was the interaction that stemmed from the question. We began with a very innocent and Continue reading “The Ultimate Pain Killer” →