Gratitude is a choice

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I woke up and went to bed reflecting on what my friend Brooke often says: “Gratitude is a choice.”

I spent the day mostly offline, not having to work (grateful), with family and family friends (grateful), cooking and enjoying a fresh, healthy meal (grateful), doing Zumba with my lifelong neighbor and friend for an hour, her leading a class of all ages, all of us dancing, smiling, shaking it out (grateful).

How am I grateful? Let me count the ways…

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is an opportunity

Work has become busier lately. It tends to happen at this time, the collective push to wrap things up by end of calendar year (arbitrary timelines, but we’re all bought in, so it is what it is!) when it feels like all we want to do and are meant to do is slow, taking cues from nature, like fall to winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

Last year at this time I completely burned out. I was overextended at work, doing things I wanted to do and felt were important, but were beyond my capacity. I took a month off at the holidays and returned more centered, lighter and resolved—to not reach that point again.

So, this time, rather than see this, and feel this, as a time of stress, concern, burdening, overwhelm, I’m pausing more, reflecting and reframing. This is an opportunity. This is an opportunity to strengthen my boundaries. To prioritize. To decide what I want to do right now, and how I want to do it.

I choose to believe that everything that is presenting itself, for own good, our best good. It’s in service of our growth, and the bigger challenges—or opportunities—show up to show us where we are in that growth, and how we have grown. This is an opportunity; there is an opportunity in this, and in everything.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Sometimes, someone says something you’ve heard before, lots of times, and it’s like you’re hearing it, really hearing it, for the first time. You know?

This happened to me last week at the eye doctor’s, a stylish spot on Abbott Kinney in Venice with all and only international designer frames, exposed concrete walls and big coffee tables books about LA and California that had me daydreaming even though I live here. (I loved it.) I was reading those letters with one eye covered, alternating, right eye, left eye, as instructed. Then I could see it all again, with both eyes. I think I said something to the optometrist like, whoa, that really makes a difference, to which he responded, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” And I sat there, feeling like I was hearing that for the first time ever, seeing clearly again, and it all felt very profound. Maybe it was adding another sense in that made it all make deeper sense.

I looked up the origin of the quote and it seems as though it’s a misquoted quote of Aristotle’s, as it is really, instead, I guess, about Emergence, the properties of a system, or that which “…refers to the existence or formation of collective behaviors — what parts of a system do together that they would not do alone.” (From the New England Complex Systems Institute. A complex name.) This author says the quote would instead be something like, “The System is something beside, and not the same, as its elements.” (And now I know, thanks to that site, that there’s something called an International Council on Systems Engineering and that one can become certified as a Systems Engineering Professional and this is all feeling very complex, but also makes sense, and I’m reminded of how complex is not a synonym for complicated.)

Things have the meaning we give them, anyway, and I think both quotes, both concepts, both aphorisms, feel special and make sense. Or, makes senses.

I'll be glad I wrote this

I was getting ready today with some thoughts softly bumping around in my brain, like a li’l video game, and I was like, I want to write that “expand, not contract” thing I’ve been saying to myself these last weeks. And I was like, maybe I won’t do that right now; maybe I just write this. And it felt like a flowy response from my heart that said right back, “you’ll be glad you wrote this.”

Even just this. Because you wrote it for you, and it felt nice. It is nice to do this. We like this! And then I was like, yeah, I’ll be glad I wrote this. And then it/I continued, a subconscious stream of self-motivation. I’ll be glad I took that trip, and I’ll be glad that I do that bigger thing I’m thinking about for next year, and maybe that other bigger thing, too, yeah. Holding that, moving toward that feels right, whatever happens with it. Because it’s all part of all of it.

I’ll be glad I wrote this.

Expand, not contract

This came to me during a meditation a few weeks back, and it’s felt right as I’ve continued to move through life. (Or, as I’ve let life move through me? Have you heard that concept before, that we’re the universe experiencing being human? Or, we are the universe experiencing itself? I think Neil deGrasse Tyson said it…)

It’s this idea, this awareness, of how when something new arises, a change, we—humans, animals, all of us—have the natural reaction to contract. To hide, to go inward, to shy away from. It’s a form of a protection. It’s also a form of rejection, I think. Of rejection of something that may be a wonderful thing. Different can mean scary, but not bad. It can be good scary. Exciting. (My friend and I started to say “excitey.”)

I’ve heard this concept referenced often in money consciousness, too. Rather than saying, for example, I want to do this (a trip, a career change, a move), so I need to save money, it’s instead about opening up to attracting in more. Creating space to welcome in the resources and opportunities, an act of trust.

So, I remind myself. Be aware of where and when you contract, maybe explore why. Gently, curiously. Consider, instead expanding into it. Even consider considering a different initial reaction is expansion in itself.

May we continue to expand, to ripple, to “flow… in ever widening rings of being,” like Rumi says.

Expand, not contract. Abundance, and not lack.

Life is meant to be enjoyed

Over the past years I’ve come into the belief that life is meant to be enjoyed, and that life doesn’t have to be hard; in fact, life is meant to be enjoyed; it’s meant to be easy, and it’s meant to flow.

It felt like a big, obvious secret to discover, or more like, rediscover, because I think it’s a concept that I think we’re born knowing and, ideally, grow up embodying as freewheeling, playful, imaginative, open children. Then, most of us lose it or are convinced out of it, convinced otherwise, through this conditioned concept of “real life,” and the “real world” and such. (Especially in the U.S., I think! A country founded on the Puritan work ethic, where children were treated as “little adults,” where this world was a necessary, get-through-it earthly stopover to show just how worthy of deliverance to heaven in the afterlife, or whatever.) For more on this, too, I super, super recommend don Miguel Ruiz’s writings of Toltec teachings, like The Four Agreements, which talk about “the dream of the planet.”

I remember hearing at one point that…

Buddha’s famous quote “life is suffering,” is actually a imprecise translation. It’s more so that, “life is enduring,” and it speaks to the idea of the continuity, the forever flow of life.

It’s not a justification for suffering; not as setting ourselves up to expect that whole human experience to be that way. (And that’s the interesting thing about translation; it reveals so much about the values and energy of a culture. I loved reading and writing about this concept, especially in relation to Jorge Luis Borges’ writing on it when I studied Spanish literature in college. An aside.) I heard that so long ago I can’t remember when or from whom, but it’s stayed with my powerfully, “empowerfully,” I’ll invent a word to say, since.

So, here they are, the big secrets of life as I’ve intuited and discovered them so far, through my one narrow, singular and also somehow universal (as we all are!) lived experience.

1. Life is meant to be enjoyed

2. Life doesn’t have to be hard—in fact, life is meant to be easy, easeful

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For Dawn, whose name alone represents the coming of light, and who has so gently and sweetly guided me through so much of my own spiritual exploration.

Let it all fall into place

Fallen into fall, after all, or something! The turning, vibrant, dropping leaves on my recent East Coast visit had me feeling more of an air of surrender, and thinking about the grandness of allowing. Of how by allowing things to be, to fall as they may, things fall into place. That releasing my grip of control—and control comes from fear—allows things to be as they’re meant to be. And what results has repeatedly shown me, and continues to show me, is better than I ever could have imagined, anything that I could have controlled into creation.

Let go, and let it all fall into place. The trees know. And they look so beautiful doing it, too.

Let it all fall away

I’ve realized recently that I don’t care about a lot of things. Like things I know don’t matter, but I was still giving thought, energy and attention to. (All of which would be much better invested elsewhere, or even nowhere, in nothing). Things like ruminating on whether xyz was the right choice when I know it makes no difference now because we’re in the now. Or things that don’t really matter much because they actually don’t align with my values or interests or what I want I want to be part of or have be part of me.

I was on the East Coast recently and the leaves were “peaking;” a beautiful decay and array of falling colors, and that felt like a symbolic little invitation to just let things fall that I don’t need, that I don’t care about much, after all. Let them fall away and be absorbed into the earth and make way for new growth. And letting them go may make me feel bare for a little bit, but that’s the only way to make space for what’s coming next. And it’s kind of nice to just be out there in this new way, anyway, feeling it all, open, ready for whatever.