Changes
Sometimes it’s hard to decide what you want your life to look like, especially at this time of year, we are bombarded with ideas of what we should be doing to transform our life, then only to be told last week that it was the week that we would break our new year’s resolutions. Yesterday, Blue Monday –the most depressing day of the year. Social media bombards us with how perfect people’s lives are – but how true are these posts?
People rarely choose to post up about bad stuff that’s going on its all sweetness and light. Some do I know, but more often or not these posts tend to be in a group where people feel safe to share how they are really feeling. Making changes are tough. Are our goals realistic? Is it what we really want or is it what we think we want or what we think we should be doing, should have, should look like, is it going to bring us happiness. All too often we compare our life to somebody else’s if only I could be like him or her, if only I was as good as so and so, if only the internal mental chatter constantly eroding at our wellbeing, on all levels of our body and soul. The question is does what you doing make your heart sing? Does it make your soul smile and shine brightly? If not why are you doing it?
When I worked with parents of substance using young adults, the parents were often saying to me he/she should be doing this or that, they should be learning to drive they should be going to university, but is that what that young adult wants to be doing? Why should they learn to drive? Definitely where I live we have a good public transport system, (let’s not get into the whole train timetable debacle) but on the whole it’s good, I often choose to bus or train rather than drive, it’s easier, it’s less stressful. I also feel we live in a society where everything needs to be instant, people are looking for instant gratification, but in reality changes do take time. If we really want our lives to look, be, feel different to how they are, we need to work to make those changes, we have to do things to make them happen.
I often talk about the gardening needed to make our seeds grow. If we plant something in our garden we don’t just leave it (well sometimes we do!) but generally we “weed” or remove growth from around it that we don’t want there, we hope it will rain, or we water it, we hope the sunshine to help it grow and flourish. Each seed that we plant within ourselves for our dreams to grow needs this attention too. Often to see the end result of a big change takes many small steps. We can get lost on the journey become disheartened, deflated, thinking what’s the point it’s never going to happen, I’m stuck in this job, this house, this body whatever it is. Sometimes when we stop and reflect we can see we’ve come a long way and there have been changes but in the day to day of life we don’t stop, we don’t notice. I put on an Instagram post recently that we need to be kind to ourselves, each day is a new day. We don’t have to make changes just at the New Year, we can make changes whenever we wish. Yes there are ideal times to sow our seeds such as a New Moon, Imbolc, to name but two but essentially each day is a new day and if you wake up tomorrow thinking you want to start sewing then start tomorrow, it maybe that tomorrow just sees you finding out about what courses are around, what tools there are on the internet, what can friends teach you and so on. We’re not going to wait until next January! Each skill that we have took time, we didn’t just start walking or writing one day, it took time it took effort, mistakes were made along the way and we learnt from each mistake. If you planned to run every Tuesday but didn’t run today because it snowed, you can run another day, or wait until next week, you haven’t failed. We often forget too, that sometimes we need to let go of something to make room for something else. Life is all about balance. The only person that knows what is right for you is you. The only person that knows what makes your heart truly sing and your soul shine brightly is you. Yes others may know things that you like, things that make you happy but they don’t know the deeper inner you.
