A chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of choices.....

The Second Time Around

Our  entire life is made up of choices - decisions - what we decide - the actions we take, the attitude we display. All represent the steps of our life. Sometimes we take two steps forward and then one step back. Sometimes we take baby steps, sometimes giant steps. But the secret to our life success is to not let that one step back turn into failure but to keep on stepping forward in this dance called life.

Along the paths of my life journey I have discovered that I am solely responsible for my choices and have accepted the consequences of every word, thought and deed throughout my life. 

I have often been asked - in fact, have often asked myself - what I might do differently if I had the chance to live my life over again. There are a slew of situations - big and little - that I would probably handle differently a second - more mature - time around. The list of things I could have done differently are many.  But the lessons I have learned along my life journey have taught me that there are no completely bad or good choices, as ultimately, even the choices I have made that have been challenging were exactly what I needed in my personal destiny, for my ultimate good. 

This perspective has been liberating. Most of my every day, and sometime horrid choices can be chalked up to destiny. However, ethical choices I have made have been mine alone and they can't be regarded the same way because my loss of composure and resulting behavior was a result of my personal free choice. And these types of choices are always regrettable.

Fortunately, however, after I made these less- than- perfect choices there was always an opportunity for me to use those decisions for my own benefit. In hindsight - and in hindsight only - I can accept that this was exactly what I needed - at that moment - for my individual spiritual progress. I may have chosen a regrettable path that consequently got me into a bind, but, when properly utilized, the setbacks and the lessons I took from them propelled me to incredible heights.

If I could live my life over again, how would I do it? Differently, perhaps. But I don't get to live it again. Therefore, the only decision I now really need to be conscious of making is the decision to continue to use every one of my choices as an impetus for self-improvement. And in so doing, I will be truly wiser as I continue to place my footprints along the paths of my life journey.

Emotions can move us but our soul, if nurtured, will guide us.....

Whispers

By Beverlee Blampied (c)

White clouds moving slowly
Calm breezes wafting tranquility
My soul breathes - whispers
Of faith, hope, love
And my heart starts to heal
I am caught in the moment
My soul starts to fly
Away from places 
Where pain and hurt once dwelled
Memories flow past me
Tears drip slowly down my cheeks
The whispering wind wipes them dry
Soaring now, my soul is set free
And alone, in the sunset
I have finally found Peace 

Life will always lead us toward our destiny and every  single movement is meaningful and precious.....

Random thought for the day:

Life is one long journey. Along the way I have had personal missions to accomplish. Some have been big and all-encompassing, while others have been smaller, but nevertheless just as important in the overall picture. As I have passed through the various intersections in my life, sometimes, through it all, life's tediousness and seemingly impossible and often unfair complications have bogged me down. The detours along the way have cramped my style, made me 'thirsty' and painfully irritated me. Sometimes I have forgotten my destination and the reasons why I am even here. These are the moments when my journey seems pointless, monotonous and even hopelessly frustrating.  But then, out of nowhere, and off in the distance, I catch sight of an opportunity to restock, fill up on spiritual nourishment, direction and reconnection. Life's lessons have taught me that these are the rest stops along my  journey - times when I can become reinvigorated, refocus on my path and my purpose and thereby evaluate where I am heading and if I am on the right route. I have learned to take full advantage of these rest stops and now enjoy these special times - resting my footprints - focusing on the beautiful 'scenery' around me - stopping and stretching, regrouping and refocusing. Intuitively, I know that when my footprints get back on the paths of my journey I will be far more calm and certain of where I am heading. 

To know what I need, instead of humbly accepting what the world tells me I ought to prefer, is what will keep my soul alive

Fitting Rooms

A short escape to the nearest mall to window-shop or to buy a new book, a scarf or just some small accessory can be, for me, an immediate cure to perk up a stressful day or a doom and gloom outlook. Suddenly life can look a little brighter, and it's a pretty benign habit if I'm careful to not max out my credit card! 

With a few hours to spare, and desperately in need of a break, I hurried off to my favorite ladies' wear store. Within fifteen minutes of arriving I had skimmed the aisles, spotted my purchase, tried it on and was standing in line, waiting my turn at the checkout counter. The jacket I had chosen was the right size, a good fit, just my color (a perfect blend of brown, beige and black), had a designer label and was reduced to a price that I just couldn't resist.

While waiting in line, I started thinking and, of course, in the back of my mind, I knew that although the jacket fit in size, it really did not fit in style. To be honest, it was quite bulky and definitely would be uncomfortable for indoor wear. Also, I remembered that I had a similar one hanging at the back of my closet. No matter - the color was exactly what I was looking for and the salesgirl in the fitting room had acknowledge how well the jacket suited me!

On the drive home from purchasing my new garment, I started to feel slightly unsettled and I began to think about how my thoughts, speech and actions are really the 'garments' of my  soul, and just as I express who I am through the clothes that I wear, so should my soul express it's longings and wants, capabilities and talent - its unique self - by clothing itself in thoughts, spoken words and actions.

Sometimes I have chosen clothes that suit my style, just as I have acted, thought and spoken compatibly with the true goals in my life. I have carefully selected garments that should be incorporated into my wardrobe and I have put aside those that should be bypassed. Other times, though, external factors have sidetracked me. It may have been social pressure, attractive colors or just an external fit. However, whatever the case was, I should not have been ignoring the most important factor - I should have been aware of what choices really would express the 'me' that I feel comfortable with.  Were the life choices that I was making in tune with my inner goals? Did they feel right and comfortable with the person I was wanting to be?

Life's lessons have taught me that it is necessary, on a continual basis, to reassess my life's purchases, big or small. The next time I feel the need to shop I may again find myself standing in line exactly where I was when I chose my new jacket.  But, for now, I will head to a different counter, new jacket in hand - a counter with a sign that reads Customer Service. And, I'll continue to only shop in stores where refunds are readily accepted! 

Our mothers teach us who we are and our children teach us the art of motherhood.....

Happy Mother's Day

To my children on this Mother's Day:

You are my children, my world, my hopes, my happiness, my love - and with all these things that both of you have given me, and continue to give me, I have learned through you, and you have opened my heart and made my life complete - you have made me a mother..... 

Your mother Is always with you -

She's the whisper of the leaves as you walk down the street, the smell of fabric softener in your freshly laundered clothes, the cool hand on  your forehead when you are not well. Your mother lives inside your emotions and she is crystalized in your every tear. She is the place you came from, your first home and she is the map you unconsciously follow with every step that you take. She was your first love and your first heartache and nothing on earth can separate you - Not time, not space, and not even death.....

The creation of something new is accomplished when we give ourselves the freedom to believe that we are not just passive observers but are actually partners in the creation of our own world..... 

The Shards of Life

Many times along the paths of her life journey she had tended to miss the forest for the trees. What she had observed she had often seen as isolated and disconnected. Instead of hearing a song in the noise around her she had heard a series of clangs and vibrations. Instead of seeing a dance she had only seen a kick, and a turn of the head. A kick was just a click and a clang was just a clang.

Until now when, as a retired senior, she had enrolled in art lessons, held once a week at the local community centre. She had only completed a few pieces, as once a week wasn't really very much time to finish anything. One of her projects had been the creation of a ceramic plate. Over a few weeks she had carefully formed it from clay - fully, with her hands, and she had designed, on the plate's surface, a figure of a delicate flower, out of the softer clay.

After it had hardened in the kiln and cooled off over a period of several days, she had painted all areas of the plate with different colors of glaze, making sure that the colors went well with each other, wiping away the paint and redoing it over and over until it was perfect in her eyes. 

She had had to wait a couple of weeks to get her piece fired the second time to turn the paint glaze into a glossy finish. The week that she was able to take the plate home, she had arrived at class, excited, ready to see the finished product. She had waited impatiently as  students got their pieces back. Finally, the teacher approached her workspace, but just before she reached her table, in what had seemed like slow motion, her masterpiece flew out of the teacher's hands, crashing to the cold, hard tile.

Cringing, she had looked at the floor, now covered in pieces of what used to be her plate. She had tried not to show her disappointment to the teacher who was already feeling terrible about losing hold of the plate. Forcing a smile, she had assured the teacher that she would try to figure out something that she could do with all the shards of ceramic. She had picked a piece up off the floor, but could not make out which part of the plate or flower it was. One piece alone might as well have been nothing. She was defeated. 

She then started to collect the rest of the shards to throw them away. She had placed them all on the table, ready to put them into the empty, hungry, taunting recycling bin. But, as the first of the pieces hit the bowels of the bin with a resounding thud, she had noticed that a thin. blue line on one of the pieces seemed to flow into a thin, blue line on the piece next to it. She picked one piece up with one hand, the next with the other. She held her hands up and brought the two pieces together. Though barely separated by a thin, jagged shadow where they had been broken apart, they were a perfect fit. 

She quickly made up her mind. She grabbed the discarded pieces and began to reconstruct her new puzzle - gluing piece by piece, and by the end of the class, she had a new masterpiece. A well-loved, painfully delicate, perfectly imperfect masterpiece.  It wasn't a mistake anymore. It was art. And it was whole.

Through her creative endeavor she had learned another crucial life lesson: nothing in the world can function on its own. Alone, every single thing in existence is nothing. Everything, be it a ceramic shard, a bang on a drum, the petal of a flower, or a human being, is one part of a whole. For her plate to have been reconstructed to have become complete it had to first crack into pieces. Much like life, she had realized. When, as a child, she had scraped her knee, a part of the knee was then actually missing. Throughout her life journey her heart had had to ache and yearn for many years before she found the other half of her soul. And It had taken being broken to realize what her whole entity was.

    

The tragedy is not that life is short but that we often see only in hindsight what really matters.....

Step-Backs and Restrictions

From the moment of birth her journey began. In every episode of her life, in every moment of growth she had stepped forward along the paths of that journey. Her every characteristic, her every talent and ability, her every encounter with life contributed to who she was.  Enthusiastically she set out on the long journey ahead of her. In her naivete she imagined that her journey would be a straightforward one with clearly delineated directions and sign posts at the forks in the road. But instead of a well-paved pathway she encountered many a bumpy and winding route. Setbacks. Her journey was full of them. But each stop, each rest, even each wrong turn ultimately provided a life lesson - a new vantage point and perception - a new awareness and a new sensitivity.

She had grown up dreaming about her Prince Charming, lost in the idea of 'love' as she understood it. Love seemed easy. She became consumed with romance. She read romantic novels, watched romantic movies, and dreamed romantic dreams. But as she matured she began to see problems in the world of love. She watched people compromise themselves for romances that were obviously temporary. She saw momentary pleasure taking the place of true intimacy. She knew children and adults who had been thoroughly hurt by their parents' bad marriages. She found it ironic that in a world obsessed with analyzing and discussing relationships it was actually very difficult to find good relationship models. She began to wonder if true love was even possible. 

And then she met the love of her life. She knew it from the moment she set her eyes on him. Handsome. Intelligent. Sensitive. She gazed deeply into his eyes and saw the depths of his soul, a reflection mirroring her own. She set out on the ultimate journey of bliss and harmony in their idyllic life together.  

One morning, however, she woke up and realized that their blissful journey of togetherness contained more than she had bargained for. Petty arguments, full blown disagreements, quarrels that lasted for hours, sometimes even days. All of a sudden she realized that this perfect soulmate had some very real needs and wants - some of which differed drastically from her own. He had his own established outlook and perception on things which sometimes pulled in a very different direction than her own. 

Her smooth journey now developed a number of bumps and life threw even greater challenges at her. She experienced a crisis to her health, to her emotional state and to her financial well-being - external circumstances that just shouldn't have been. A block in her way to her perfect life - a restriction.

So now began the real journey - the hard work - the uphill climb to a happy and fulfilled life. To continue to successfully develop this relationship she realized that she needed to look beneath her partner's baggage to rediscover his true essence. She needed to see beyond his resulting needs to uncover, again, the beauty of his soul. More importantly she needed to continue to work on herself to transcend her constricted ego-based vantage point.

As hard as it was, even in those ugly moments of their life together - even in the stops, the resting areas and the wrong turns of their life - they learned to be there for each other. Each crisis in their relationship became an opportunity for them to reach a higher level of closeness. Each set-back became a chance for them to forge a deeper connection and to reveal the deeper bonds of their relationship that could only surface in response to difficulty and hardship. Each restriction was an opening to reveal how their relationship was not dependent on surface matters or good times only. 

Through much soul-searching she had discovered that a strong, unbreakable relationship is developed only when both partners focused on giving and exploring what was specifically special about them. That the ultimate partnership was between two people who could 'build' with each other - two people who diligently nurtured their relationship. True love is based in reality, and as they shared the mundane and painful experiences of their life they now truly learned to love. These shared moments of growth are their most intimate experiences. Their shared tears had helped them grow and brought them to the acceptance that their relationship was not disposable, but was, instead, irreplaceable. 

Along our life journey, we must find our way to who we really are and then live with that decision.....

Deceptions

She leaned against the door and watched her life-long friend - her perfect friend - as she stood at the kitchen sink preparing vegetables for dinner. She had always thought of her friend as one of the most straightforward, honest and dependable people she had ever known.

Until now - now that she herself had experienced the pain of betrayal - and her mind had begun to accept the incredible complexity of people and their motives.

There had to be more to her friend than she saw before her. There had to be more than she had ever seen and maybe more than she would ever see. There had to be some event that her friend kept to herself - a secret desire never acted upon but nevertheless cherished. Hidden resentments. There had to be.

Or did there have to be? Maybe her friend was keeping nothing to herself. Maybe some people simply had nothing to hide from the world. They lived one hundred percent honestly. If guilt was possible, then why couldn't innocence be possible too? Maybe, but she was beginning to doubt that a truly innocent life was a possible one.

It was complicated, this thing called life. People wore masks. One person might harbor various personalities within themselves and might comprise several layers of characters.

And because of this, a person might never, ever know for certain if or when they were doing the right thing or the best thing or the smartest thing. And if a person couldn't be sure about the quality of their own words and actions, how, then, could they ever interpret the words and actions of anyone else?

She found herself thinking often, now, about secrets and silence - about how deceptions, both large and small, were so much a part of human interaction. About how easy it was to find oneself alone or apart. About how, suddenly, in the midst of a life filled with friends and family, she could feel so completely and hopelessly alone.....  

The rocky paths of our life journey can lead us to reconsider the meaning of our existence and thereby to adjust our sails accordingly.....

Random thought for the day:

Each and every one of us has some sore spot - some part of us that has been "burned" - some point of tenderness, and some area of sensitivity in our lives. It is that wounded part of us that needs delicate care and soothing treatment. When something or someone touches this raw area we can experience a "burning"  sensation of hurt, anger or misery. It may be a mild, innocuous comment, but any contact with that bruised part of our ego can cause an intense pain to shoot right through us.  It, on the other hand, may be a lukewarm action - one that was really not meant to cause any suffering - but handling this sore area can also create tremendous discomfort. Returning to immediate normalcy is out of the question - dealing with our own sensitivity to the issue at hand - the issue that has caused us the distress - is the primary concern and one that needs careful addressing so as to prevent resentment, grief or rage at the audacity of the individual who has made the comment and/or issued the action that has resulted in opening our wounds.