Play a Role

When I first read The Alchemist, it absorbed me like no other book I was reading at the time. I poured over it relishing the phrasing, visualizing the setting, wondering where he came up with these ideas.

As we move through life, it's simpler to say we're powerless. Someone else made or makes the decisions. We only influence a small corner of our world.

Think about this. Especially in today's world with the capacity for instantaneous connections. I was responding to something a friend posted on Facebook recently. As is often the case, others had also responded. In the visible list was another friend's name. Someone I had no idea knew the person. So were were doubly connected in that instant.

Have you ever experienced someone telling you how some seemingly small act of your kindness had greatly affected them? It may not even have been directed toward them, may even have been something they heard about from someone else. Or a comment that was overheard. We make impressions on people we know ~ and people we do not know.

That puts Paulo Coelho's statement about "...every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world" into the perspective of today's world. We aren't simply what we say or do, we are what and how we are seen, heard and remembered.

A number of years ago, a friend and I were discussing death. I commented that I stay in the background so much that I doubted anyone outside my family and a couple of close friends would notice my passing. Her jaw dropped. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, My friend, you have no idea how many people you have touched in the time we've known each other. It was my turn to be stunned. Was my comment false humility? I don't think so. I really didn't see what she saw. However, I accepted what she said at face value ~ and that brief comment and touch rocked my view of myself in the world.

Coelho says that's true for all of us. We each help to create the history of the world in which we live. Together we are more powerful than we know. It's time to step up and accept our role.

Who has influenced your world? Who's world do you influence? How powerful do you feel? What do you think is your greatest strength? How does it help strengthen the world? What would change in your life if you believed Coelho's words?

Letting Sadness Be

Aleph, Paulo Coelho

For some unknown reason, I felt a great sadness weighing me down part of the day yesterday. It's a moveable feeling. It shows up every now and again, as though I have lost something or someone recently. Grief. And yet not quite to the defined extreme as grief can be.

When I came across this quote, it was amazingly applicable to what I felt. Most specifically, Tears are words that need to be shed. Something inside me, deeper than I knew possible at the moment, needed to be shed. Needed, even called, to be released.

I know people who believe that we continually need to keep our energy and perspective at the highest vibration or level possible. If we continue to focus on the positive and the best outcomes, we draw that to ourselves. That's the Law of Attraction. Although I agree with the principle, my experience is that For me personally, I must let the emotion be. I must call it by name, not to focus energy on it, but to acknowledge it. If and when I do that, I release the emotion into the Universe, into the hands of the Divine, to be transformed. If and when I do not acknowledge it, it continues to knock on my inner door, disturbing my stability.

That brings me to the final sentence of Coelho's quote: Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end. In my life, I have kept tears at bay. I have swallowed them before they ever left my eyes. I have walked away from situations so I would not let the tears flow. Without the tears, and the ensuing words that create and embrace them, dullness takes over. In my experience, I cannot call it sadness because its texture is different. Sadness has emotion and power that arrives with it. What I feel is dullness. As though nothing can penetrate and touch my space, my mood, my being. I would rather let the tears come, let sadness be, know that tomorrow will bring another chance for joy.

What do you do when you feel sad? Do you ever feel a general sadness, without a reason? How do you handle that? How does it feel when you act as though sadness is gone (and it truly is not)? What do you do to work through that feeling?

God's Tools

I've spent entirely too much time in my life being afraid of making a misstep off the path. To paraphrase another famous quote, sometimes the path diverges and I've had a choice to make. Do I continue on the one I've been walking? Do I step onto another, that leads in an unknown direction? Which path at which time is the best one for me? The questions rise and fall like my breath flowing in and out of my lungs.

I've been afraid of making mistakes. Felt more of the perfectionist coming out in me. Ha! Not sure the status of being a perfectionist. The feeling arose more from the drive to not fail, not look like a fool, not be wrong.

Then there were the moments when I took the steps irregardless of the consequences. My moves from one place to another, across the country and the world, were like that. Stepping into and out of relationships was like that. My path often found me and I tripped onto it, making mistakes and friends along the way.

I've considered disappointment as God's tool. It's provided me the impetus to shift gears, to reach out, to lean into counting my blessings and looking for the brighter side. I've been afraid that it's meant I'm not good enough for or at whatever. I've sunk into the depths of feeling bad and wanting to run and hide. Somehow, I've found something to rest my gratitude on ~ a phone call or a card, a sunset or a quarter on the street. Something that slips a different tone into my vision and I am grateful.

How have you found your path? How many times has it changed, twisted, turned, diverged? How have God's tools kept you going? What or who has helped you get or stay on your path?

Closing Doors

My mother used to say, "When one door closes, God opens a window." I know she wasn't the first to utter those words. But in my mind, it's always her voice saying it. It's an incredible message of hope ~ and it often keeps me going when I feel immersed in darkness.

Paulo Coelho's quote brings a new clarity to this phrase as well as to the concept of closing doors. Sometimes the closing of a door has a positive purpose. Sometimes the doors we are accustomed to traversing no longer serve us. Sometimes those doors keep us fixed in places where we are comfortable, but no longer growing.

All my life I've been pretty much of a loner. Because of that, I've learned a great deal about closing doors, closed doors and swinging doors. In high school I often felt like a hex nut in a hammer and nail world. I took choir because we had to take a performance art class, yet I did not like performing. Closed that door after that year. Whew! Then in college, I was approached by a graduating senior and asked to try out for the gospel choir. Huh? Me? But on a whim, because she asked, I did it. At the very open, very packed tryouts, I won a place not only in the 200+ voice performing choir, but also in the 50 voice traveling choir. That door I thought closed? It turned out to be open again. Sometimes that can happen as well. Though I still consider myself a non-performer, that year with the gospel choir led me into a new world for a time. When the performance door closed at the end of that year, I knew it was time to let it go and move on.

Closing doors are not always locked. Sometimes doors need our help to close, to let go, to move on. We can take what we've learned and apply the lessons elsewhere. Though not easy, it can be refreshing simply to acknowledge that the door is closed.

When have you had a door close? When have you been the one to close the door? Can you see that where it led no longer served you? Are you still trying to pry it open? What open window or door might you be missing?

Do It Now

Nike has a motto: Just Do It. My objection to that motto is that it sounds not only trite, but also marginally demeaning. How one hears the statement depends on the tone used when another person actually says it.

So different from that is this quote. It has a lead in statement: Time is moving along; "someday" or "one day" is a future time that may never arrive. Do the things you want to do now. Stop putting them off for that chimerical "one day" and do them in the present time, the time you know you have.

I'm good ~~ well, mostly good ~~ at planning for tomorrow, for that future time. I want things to happen at a pace that I can tolerate, that won't throw me into that scary space of the unknown. Sometimes that can be good. Being a mom means doing the best I can to provide consistency for my daughter. Now that she's in college, that responsibility falls more and more to her. My responsibility is to step fully into the next phase of my life... whatever that may be!

What do you want to do? Are you doing it consistently in your life? Does fear get in your way? How do you deal with that fear?

Trust and Move

After reflecting on living a solitary life, on being alone, this quote popped into my world. That exceptional phrase: "We are not alone in the dark...."

One of the very first things we learn upon leaving the womb ~ and possibly even within it ~ is to trust and move. We must move in order to exit the womb ~ and we must trust that there is someone who will catch us when we leave and who will be with us once we are outside. It's an unconscious movement forward in life, on to the next phase of who and what and where we are.

Then we're here. in the air and with all this space around us, and we begin to learn or believe that we are unsafe ~ we begin to lose that innocent trust we once had. It takes awhile. We eventually slow down so the world can catch up with us.

I love this statement, though. It reminds me of times I used to walk down the streets of Chicago with my eyes closed ~ just for the space of a dozen steps or so ~ to see where I would wind up, which way I would be headed, if i could stay on a straight path, and how long I would trust that I was going in the right direction. I think it's time to play like that again.

How do you feel about the dark? How do you feel in the dark? How much do you trust the unfolding of your path? If you're not alone, who is with you?