Do you dance?

28 Apr

Our lives are busy. We have families. We have jobs, and friends. We have hobbies we enjoy. You might have a dog, or a cat, or a pet turtle. We’re busy. People expect things from us, and we try to accommodate them. Sometimes though it seems like people expect a lot from us, and accommodating everyone can become a burden. So we learn to adapt. We learn to dance. We do a little bend here, a slide there, maybe a dip next, and the notorious two step when it’s needed. Dancing can be fun, and sometimes it can be tricky so we need to be careful. If we dance all the time, we can lose ourselves while we perform for others.

Maybe your boss expects you to portray a certain image. It’s a good image, maybe not who you really are, but you play along for the sake of getting along. Or your family wants you to do something that you really don’t enjoy, but everyone else wants to do it so you go along. You want everyone to be happy, and it’s not like you HATE the activity so you adjust. Maybe your companion wants to go somewhere that you don’t want to go. They are pressing you to agree, and you eventually say it’s fine, you’re happy to go. But that’s not exactly true – you aren’t really happy to go, but you’ll go because it’s easier than saying no. You take a little step to the left.

We learn to dance. We do what is expected, we turn where we’re directed, and we partner up when needed. There is a saying that we should “dance like nobody is watching.” If we were truly dancing like nobody was watching, we probably would be doing things a bit differently. We might throw our arms in the air, tap our toe, smile and say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” And then happily sashay away in a different direction. If we danced like nobody was watching, like nobody expected certain steps, we could move our own way all the time, and we might be happier.

Life isn’t really like that though. Sometimes we need to accommodate those we care about or need in our lives. But if we accommodate everyone else all the time, at the expense of our individual choices, eventually, the dance catches up to us, and we lose our footing. So, we need to find the balance. Sometimes we give a little, and sometimes we hold firm. Sometimes we agree, and sometimes we say no. It’s okay to turn down requests. It doesn’t mean we don’t care. It just means that this time, we’re dancing to our own music. We’re choosing our own steps. Maybe a tango isn’t right for us today. Maybe everyone else is doing the tango, but today we need to waltz. We’re still dancing, but today we will choose our own steps. You can always choose your own steps. Do you feel like waltzing today? It’s a perfect day for it!

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I’m all broken up over it.

27 Apr

I recently dropped a glass on the kitchen floor. The floor is tile so the glass broke into at least a million pieces – at least. I got the broom out, and carefully began to sweep up the dangerous mess, and then I got down on my hands and knees with a wet cloth to make sure I didn’t miss any tiny barbs destined to cut my feet. Broken glass can be tricky. It’s hard to see and very sharp. You have to be careful to get it all picked up or it’ll come back to cut you. And that’s no fun. After it was cleaned up, I reached into the cabinet again for another glass, and it slipped, but thankfully I did not drop that one, which was a great relief.

Bad and unexpected things happen to us sometimes. We aren’t made of glass, but there are times in our lives when we can feel broken by something that’s happened. The pain is too great, the suffering has gone on for too long, or the loss is too painful. We break. Not all the way like a glass on the floor, but enough that we feel like we’re in pieces, and nothing is fitting together. We feel disconnected. We feel untethered. We feel bad.  And sometimes during those fractured times, it’s hard to see how we’ll get it all put back together again. How we’ll clean everything up, and make it work.

There is no set timetable for fixing a break inside of us. It’s not like the six week cast for a broken arm. Every situation, every break is different. Some breaks feel all encompassing and take a lot of time to repair. Others aren’t so intense, and we can bounce back more quickly. But no matter how long it takes, the period during the break hurts. We’re out of sync, and it can feel like we have a flat tire, loping down the road slightly off kilter. The world is off its axis. Everything feels strange, and uncomfortable. We’re not ourselves.

No matter how extensive our breaks are, once we decide we’re going to fix them, they begin to mend. There is a saying that time heals all wounds, and in some ways time is the best medicine for a break. But time is just one part of how we heal.  Attention to the break is needed.  We need to look at it, examine it from different angles, figure out how we got broken to begin with, and determine how we can fix the situation.  It will take some time.  We may get impatient, but even in the impatience, things can move forward.  We can heal.  We will heal.

If you feel broken, if something is out of whack, something is wrong, take a little while to examine the problem. What happened? How can you fix it? How can you heal the break? All the answers are inside you. If you feel lost, seek the help of someone you trust. Listen. Think. Take your time. You’ll figure this out. When we break a bone and it heals, it is stronger than it was before we broke it. We are the same way. Once we fix what is broken inside, we are stronger than before. And being stronger is a great gift. No break is permanent. This will change. You’ll heal and be stronger on the other side.

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Line in the Sand

26 Apr

We all have limits and there comes a time when they arrive. We’ve had enough. We’re done. We’re drawing the line in the sand. We aren’t going any further. Maybe this happens in our romantic relationships, maybe it concerns work, and maybe it’s a family situation we can’t tolerate anymore. Whatever the reason, we’ve reached our limit, and we are done. We’re over it.

Drawing a line in the sand doesn’t mean we are at a full stop. It means we want to change our direction. Our course needs to be corrected. The path we’ve been on, and the things we’ve been doing aren’t working. They are causing us heartache, or pain, or both. We took it as long as we could, and now we have to change. There is nothing wrong with changing our courses, and ending a situation we can no longer tolerate. We are in charge of ourselves, and we get to choose when, and how we want to proceed.

But before we throw our hands up, and say “ENOUGH!”, and make the decision to turn completely away, we should first take some time to identify exactly what we want in the long run. Sometimes we don’t have to totally end what we’re doing to get there, and a modification is all that’s called for. We can adjust the plan, we can amend the decision, and we can turn a little to the right or to the left to fix things. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of communicating more effectively. Sometimes it’s a transient situation that will work itself out, and we are over reacting. Sometimes we’re just tired of waiting for things to change, and our patience has worn thin. We may not want to stop everything in its tracks, but it seems like the only answer.

Are you fed up with a situation in your life? Have you had enough of dealing with it, waiting for it, coping with it, and are thinking about drawing that line in the sand? Take a moment to think objectively about the results of walking away before you plunge ahead. Be sure the end result is what you want. If it is, go for it. Walk away. Tear off the rear view mirror, and proceed ahead. But if the end result isn’t where you want to go, think about the situation again, and see if there’s a way to alter your course so that you can stay in, and still be comfortable. There is nothing wrong with drawing a line in the sand. Nothing at all. Just be sure before you make the decision you understand where it will take you. And remember, proceed with caution. Once you make the change, nothing will be the same.

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The White Board

25 Apr

You know those white boards you see everywhere now? The ones with the dry erase markers that people sometimes goof up by writing on with permanent markers? At work, when a new project comes up, the meeting room we sit in to discuss it always has a white board. Generally it’s clean and ready to use, ready to record our brilliant ideas, our best plans, and all the other things that might work, or might fail as we go forward. It’s pleasing to see the clean, blank board, and it’s inspiring to think of what we’ll put on it.

What if we thought of every new day as a clean white board ready to record every thing we do that day? It’s pristine, perfectly blank, and we can decide what we want to put on it. However, we must record everything we do, so we should probably be careful about our choices. In the morning we get up, get dressed, have something to eat – we can put all that on it. Those are fairly innocuous, and don’t require much thought. But after we record those, we start making decisions. If we get angry – it goes on the board. If we are kind – it goes on the board. If we do well or if we fail – it goes on the board. At the end of the day, how will we feel when we look at all the entries we made for that day? Will we cringe at some of the decisions we now have to face? Will we feel good about the choices we made? It all depends on what we do.

The great thing about our lives is no matter what we put on the board today, before tomorrow morning comes, it’ll all be erased. The board will once again be clean and blank, and ready to record a new day. Yes, there may be some developments from the decisions we made the day before, but those decisions have already been written down and are gone. Now only our reactions, or the repercussions from them are what we will record going forward. In reality, each day of our lives is just like this. No matter what we did yesterday, or last week, last month or last year, today is a new day. We can change our course. We can make other decisions. We can choose a new path. We can eliminate things that have gone wrong in the past. We can design a new future. Every day, the board is clean, and we start again.

Today think about your white board. What will you put on it? Will you be happy when you review it later tonight? How will you change it tomorrow? Pay attention to your decisions, remembering that even though you may not really be recording them on a white board, you are definitely recording them in your life history. Choose well. We can change the future, but the past is set in stone. Make sure, as you go forward, yours looks the way you want it to.

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Tuck and Roll

24 Apr

When something terrible happens in our lives, something really bad that takes our breath away, something that shocks us, and frightens us, our initial response to coping with it might be to push it out of our minds, and refuse to think about it. That way we believe we can handle the pain. Initially it may seem like a good idea. It really hurts to think about it, and it would follow that not thinking about it would be better. So we close it off, set it aside, tuck it away behind a door in our minds. We determine that we will think about it later. Later, when we’re stronger. Later, when we’re ready. It’ll still be there, and we’ll look at it then. And who knows, maybe by then it won’t hurt so much.

It’s the old “tuck and roll” technique. You tuck it away, and roll on to something else. Unfortunately, the moment we tuck the problem away, it becomes frozen in time. It does not change, it does not morph into something easier to look at, it does not go away. It stays exactly as it was the moment we decided to ignore it. And the catch is that those problems we’ve put aside tend to get impatient if we don’t go back to them. Before long they remind us they are there. They pop up into our thoughts, and they peak into our dreams. And when they do, they still hurt because we’ve done nothing to cope with them. All we’ve done is try to forget them. And that never works.

Unfinished business is unfinished. We are not done with it, and it will remain unfinished, and continue to prick us until we garner the courage to address it. It becomes a weight that holds us down, a broken shoe that slows us up, and a stop sign in our progress. If we want to go forward, we have to go back. We have to open the door all the way, we have to open our eyes and see the problem, and we have to face the situation completely. It may hurt. It may hurt a lot, but if we want to let it go, first we have to let it come. We have to let the pain roll over us. We have to face it head on, face all our fears, and all our doubts, and stand up to it. Only after that can we finally let it go.

The biggest, heaviest, most destructive wave in the ocean can only break on the shore one time. And then it’s gone. The issues we’ve been afraid to face are the same way. They may hurt us when we let them roll over us, but if we face them, they will only hurt us once, and then we can begin to heal. The wave will have passed. There is nothing that will come to us in this life that we cannot face. Stand up. Stand strong. Open the door. Let everything out. And then, after the wave, take a breath and start again. Let it go. You’ll feel lighter, calmer, happier, and stronger afterward. It’s just a door after all. Open it.

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