Wise Words and Stories Shared Between Friends
September 6th, 2022
Dear reader, it’s been a minute and I could explain more. Instead, I’m sharing some thoughts and reflections as we check in.
A word from a friend on a phone call.
Wise words to share, unknowingly potent for such a time and place. Many people would benefit from hearing these words and considering their truths. I’m sharing those words and then my reflections to you thereafter. Consider your story as you read through. I’m talking to you as I’m riffing though in creative thoughts below. Tell me what you think, and don’t forget to share.
“You cannot live your life on the edge of hoping a toxic person, place, or thing will magically change into something good. You can’t expect a toxic relationship to fix itself. It never does and never will.”
How are you really?
You deserve the chance to be honest with yourself and live your life without the burying pressure suffocating you beneath the weight of your world misaligned. When was the chance you took a breath of fresh air, had the chance to do something you truly enjoyed and that nourished your needs from the inside out? When, where and how do you restore yourself when you feel exhausted? How do you recharge?
Perhaps it has been a long time, a very long time since you took a breath – like a real deep breath – and recaptured yourself in the very moment in front of you. When was the last time you were just laying down horizontally, closing your eyes and listening to your breath with every exhalation, able to find inner peace and calm with quite around your mind but also deep within?
There is so much healing that can be had when we spend time in conscious contemplation, deep deliberation with the self and the subconscious. When we ignore the deeper parts, we can find ourselves feeling neglected, bitter, and perhaps even carrying piercing shrapnel of resentment. Sadly, we primitively lash out at others in a fight-or-flight lizard brain response instead of gracing to our knees to meditate and think.
When we give ourselves the chance to reconnect to the sublime intangible connections of the self, we can begin to grasp the reality of our conflict – that in fact the real neglect we have given is neglecting ourselves, prioritizing others looking for approval or appeasement, hungry for love, desperate for attention or even affection. Without a deep sense of connection to the self, we end up riding the energies of others, consistently influenced by the changing environments in which we find ourselves.
Anger, aggression, sadness, depression, neglect, and abandonment
Fears and frustrations, anguish, and grief with every affliction
Never healed, never restored
Never brought to a better balance or grounding embrace
The calm within
If the calm can live within, we will always have that safe place to turn to when we face challenges external. But, if the inside is chaos itself, we will run and hide, poke and fight at others to distract ourselves from the torrent of thoughts and emotions inside our minds. We can focus on others easier than ourselves, lose a sense of safety, security, trust, and inner sanctity with the soul and spirit living within.
These are dangerous and vulnerable times. Everyone hits their breaking point. Sometimes, sadly, we humans have to wait until the pain is too much to deal with before we wake up to our will power pleading for a change. Sometimes we have to wait until the pain is so severe we’re finally willing to listen. It’s like a pinching vice grip slowly getting tighter and tighter. At first the pinch doesn’t feel too bad, and you think, “Well I could deal with this. It won’t be this way forever. I’ll be able to deal with this for a while and then things will soon change.”
As time passes by and your life remains busy, and every space of time is filled in every single day… the vice grip has grown closer, and you didn’t even know it. Because the pain was slow and dull, not fast and sharp, you grew easily numb to the pain at hand.
Closer and closer the vice grip draws on your skin, slowly crushing your bones, cutting off your blood supply and turning colors on your skin. Instead of waking up, you look away, distract yourself from the pain you feel, thinking again that you can endure a bit longer, that things will soon change or maybe even you’re earning your merit badges of endurance along the way. Perhaps you’ve internalized some sort of martyship, in which you believe you must suffer greatly in order to earn your sense of peace, or an ounce of love for that matter.
That’s the drama of the tragedy.
The audience members can see it but the characters don’t know what’s coming. Those who know the trope, the evil waiting behind the curtain, pulling strings and manipulating scenes. When our lives take center stage and we lack the community or any crowd of folks to point us in the right direction or warn us the evil lurking around stage left, our lives are marked by cycles of pain, cycles of problems because we were never willing to invite others into our story.
Without anyone watching, we’re more vulnerable than you may think. We all need other people’s perspectives to help us see the big-picture, to help us see from other angles of the stage, to warn us of potential doom, to whisper words of wisdom in difficult times. Without community we are a loss. We are lost as stories never seen, never heard, never shaped, and sculpted by the support of an open audience and raving fans, championing us along.
We each have the potential to be a hero, but without a real audience to walk alongside us in the narration and observation of our story, we remain isolated and alone, assuming the wrongful disposition that our stories are not worth sharing, that no one would ever care and thus our story continues in cycles of repeat. Nothing changes if no one changes. No one changes if nothing changes.
We each have the potential for our stories to work for us, not against us. We each have the potential to use our stories for good and to allow ourselves the chance to write our stories anew or pick up our pens for the very first time.
Writing stories, our stories
If we don’t take at least some initiative to authorize the writings of our story, whatever story the world wants to write will be written for you. That common story of pain and atrophy, anguish and musical cacophony continues repeat, pulsing against your peace, banging and clanging, cracking your conscious mind and pushing you closer to giving up, living numb and limp, or leading you in the direction of desperation. On the brink of desperation, we tend to have only two options: we either fall or we take a leap towards something better.
For us to take that leap, we must be fueled by hope and a positive outlook the unknown futures ahead of us. Without these fuels to take us further, and a few other tools to help, we lack the chance to launch us away from the past and into the new chapters of our story.
Remember this, you are the writer of your story. Don’t let it get written for you. Your past does not define you. You hold the power of active decision making to take your story in a different direction than any time before.
Whatever story you write, include others to share life with. Include yourself in their lives as well. Together, we are a vast library of stories in need of sharing.