Inspirational Saturday: Do Not Let Today Define You












We have lives with wins and losses. How, though, do we pull ourselves back after we lose at a task and get moving on to the next one? Here it is in a nutshell:

Do not let once incident define your life.

That time you stuttered during your oral report in fifth grade? That time you missed the important basket in the basketball playoff? That time you slept with someone you didn't even really like? That time you yelled at your kid when you were tired and impatient?

Your life got back up each time and kept going on with wins and losses again and again. No one task is the defining moment in your life. You find the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. Even those who achieve success, they never stop. They begin new companies, make another movie, cut another album.

No one thing defines your success or your failure; they all just show a life in dynamic movement—the ideal motion.

As well, no one loss is not insurmountable. I do recall swearing that I would never be happy again, never smile again, never feel loved after my father died when I was a teen. The fact was, life creeps back in and the happiest moments I've had and the most love were afterwards. Another truth about life:

You cannot have the same day twice no matter how you try!

Life always comes in and like the ebb and flow of an ocean tide, it wears down on the rock of your life until it has smooth edges. You have up days, you have down days, you have periods of time with drama, periods of time with boredom. Life is a fickle thing but the one thing to always know is:

The next moment is an opportunity.

I love that about life! Every time I had the worst day of my life, I later had the best. Every time I thought I'd never get over something, I forgot all about it. Time and life get in the way and change it up for you, whether you take control or not. Life is just one waiting opportunity after another.

You don't believe it?
Take a piece of graph paper. Put the years of your life along the bottom. Along the side put levels for how crappy something was. The lower the block, the crappier the event; the higher the block the happier the event. Now, put dots for those losses, those horrible events, those things you'll never forget and then put in the times you won an award, you went on a killer vacation, you had a baby, you got a raise. Looks like a crazy spiky graph, huh? Yeah, life is like that. Today, spike low on the chart; tomorrow spike off the chart.

You can't smooth out the surf, but you can learn to ride the waves.

Comments

  1. seems you learned some valuable lessons, s... kudos!

    for myself, the deaths of my mom, dad and sis, though years apart, left holes in my psyche that can never close... there, time heals nothing....

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  2. LW;
    I lost my parents, my sister and brother and very very many more. There is no one in your life quite like them, but you carry many of their traits, many of their influences. Every time I go on a road adventure, I am my brother Scott who climbed mountains and scuba dived. Every time I help others, I am my sister Tina. Every time I start a new writing venture, I am my father. Every time I plant a garden, I am my mother. We only get to borrow people. The key is to take what they gave it and incorporate into yourself so that you are the one to say "wow!" when you do something well that they would be proud of. Life has a wonderfully diverting property that makes it possible to move on and love many many people using what those who came before taught you.

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  3. not that many people are as wise as you in dealing with life.

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  4. Echo;
    Sometimes, you have to pull back enough to get a perspective on it all. It's not a day to day win and lose situation, it's a lot of days stretched out over a lifetime, some with joy, some with sorrow, and if you're smart, you figure out what you can control, what you can't control, give up visions of perfection or the world doing things your way and then you enjoy the ride and learn a helluva lot, have even more laughs and make connections. That's really the only way to get out of our own drama, to share.

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  5. Sometimes we get so caught up in the event itself that it's hard to draw back and see it in another perspective.

    My mom is in the hospital right now with a brain tumor. We're waiting for the specialist to determine what course of action he will take.

    Surgery is definite, but it's complicated. The end result is till up in the air at this point. She may be just fine, she may die.

    I know life will go on either way, but it's had to compartmentalize the situation and see it logically right now. I just hate the waiting, the not knowing.

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  6. indeed... best to enjoy each sunrise, the final sunset will come soon enough....

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  7. Bubba; I don't know if you watch Big Bang Theory, but they have an ongoing joke on there about Schrodinger's cat. It was an experiment with a paradox. Basically, a cat is in a box with radioactive material that will be released, but the experimenters are doing a blind study and do not know when it will be released and when the cat will die. So long as the cat is in the box and they have not opened it, the cat is both alive and dead. Neither outcome can be confirmed. When we go through these emergencies (I've been through so many), you don't jump ahead because we can't read the future as much as we want to. You make your decisions on how to react as information comes in. For now, your mother is safe and well and that is the present and that is where you should be. As she gets the procedure which I am sure is a standard one often practiced, she will go through that fine and you will visit with her and keep her company and support her and she will be fine. Even when you get results, you have options. Just know that each process should not be skipped to jump into a future made up in your mind. I never let myself do that anymore when someone I love is in ill health. I buckle down and help them in the present and know that when more answers come in, we will take it each step at a time. We will be present throughout the process. So my advice is to be present in the now. Please keep me posted. I would like to send her healing energy.

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  8. We'll be going up to see her tomorrow morning. I'll let you know how it goes. Thank you for the positive thoughts. :)

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  9. If you give me just a first name, Bubba, I'll give her a good long healing session.

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  10. Thanks. I'm going to do a healing on her at 5:00 my time this evening which is 8 pm EST.

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