brushstrokes upon the canvas

Living with purpose is the life goal of many people.  What is my purpose?  What am I supposed to do?  What will it say when the days end and life is summed up in a few paragraphs in a newspaper?   What do you want it to say?   The time to make that difference is today.

 

A segment from Mary Oliver’s poem asks those questions, what will become of my life?

 

Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1992)

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

 

–

What do you want paint on your canvas of life?

 

The artist in the sky

do circumstances rule you?

Time and time again circumstances flood into our lives and rob it of happiness.   That could be a true statement if you let your circumstances determine your level of happiness.

Circumstances are events that happen, in of themselves they have no emotion, no anger, no fear, and no power unless we grant the circumstance power over us, over our attitude, over our joy, and over our lives.  How many people do you know that have experienced some event and have kept that event alive in their heart as if it happened minutes ago?   Circumstances don’t control us unless we let them.

An ancient fable illustrates how we can overcome our circumstances,

The Bat and the Weasels

A BAT who fell upon the ground and was caught by a Weasel pleaded to be spared his life.  The Weasel refused, saying that he was by nature the enemy of all birds.  The Bat assured him that he was not a bird, but a mouse, and thus was set free.  Shortly afterwards the Bat again fell to the ground and was caught by another Weasel, whom he likewise entreated not to eat him.  The Weasel said that he had a special hostility to mice.  The Bat assured him that he was not a mouse, but a bat, and thus a second time escaped.

It is wise to turn circumstances to good account.

What circumstance is controlling you?

find yourself

“Life isn’t about finding yourself.  Life is about creating yourself.”   George Bernard Shaw

perfect alignment

 There will be a time when your skills, abilities, passions and dreams align and in that moment or time you will be able to deliver with great depth all that you were meant to be. Some people would call this living to your potential.

What is your potential?

What are you uniquely gifted to do?

Potential can be living your values with integrity and to the best of your ability.

Look at your rules for living?

What rules limit your potential?

What rules allow you to reach your potential?

 

 “How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become – to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being. “ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Living in the fullness of your being is living your life in perfect alignment.

Live well!

Get or give …

We make a living by what we get; We make a life by what we give. -Winston Churchill

 

lift someone up today

It is easy to speed through life and barely notice the problems that people are experiencing.   Sometimes labels are assigned to people without knowing the exact reason they aren’t doing what might be expected of them.

We travel through life at a pace that is quickening every day.   The world expects more, so we give more, and as a result our wholeness begins to get chipped away.   Each day a little bit of our soul is lost.  Eventually we find ourselves empty and hollow, lost and in a sense alone.   We have linked arm in arm with a worldview that discards people as quickly as it collects them.  

At some point we travel through a day and not know much at all of how it happened.  Did the sun rise?  Did the sun set?   Was the sun out at all?    Did we hear a bird sing?   Did we feel the wind press at our face?   What did we feel?   What did we see?   What did we hear?

One thing everyone can do is take a moment and encourage someone.  Ask them what are they grateful for?   What did they experience that brought life to their senses?    Help someone be aware of all the life that is surrounding them.   That will make a difference.

  It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment”  Cicero

 

Believe to achieve

Everywhere we go we have a bodyguard and a mindguard.  These two entities are trying to protect us from _____________  (you fill in the blank).    

The bodyguard is intensely interested, passionately involved in trying to keep you safe, physically safe.   The bodyguard is the voice that says, “No, better not do that” and you don’t.   You listen to your bodyguard in the hopes that your bodyguard will keep you safe.  Most of the time the bodyguard keeps you safe and sometimes your life will be devoid of risk, the kind of risk that is valuable for growth.

The mindguard has a different purpose, to protect you from living as you would want to.  The mindguard plants seeds of doubt and fear and hopes to hold you back from life.   We will do all kinds of things to protect our mind from the outside.   We will withdraw, we will sulk, we will become a victim, and we will do just about anything to keep the mindguard happy even if it means losing a part of our life.

Worry, doubt, fear, anxiety, control, impatience, perfectionism, and the list could go on are things the mindguard uses to control you.  

The mindguard and bodyguard are habits, controlling habits that prevent you from being all that you can be.  These guards control you rather than you controlling the guards.

What controls do you have in place that are protecting you from living a full life?

First you have to evaluate the guards and see if they are fit to be the guards of your mind and body.

What are the guards?

What are they protecting?

What are they inhibiting you from?

Now the guards aren’t going to like their territory invaded, so you must be careful. 

Believe that you can do better than you are doing.   Believe in yourself.

Identify your core values, those things you believe in deeply and know which values are the most important.   Know why your values are important, why are those important to you?

After you identify your values, determine which ones you are living by, and honoring.   What does honoring your values look like?    Create a plan to live out your values and spend some time each day working on that plan.

You have to believe in order to achieve.

  As soon as you accept the idea that you are in control of your thoughts you will be able to create your own happiness.
Lucy MacDonald

fullness of life

What an interesting life I have.   I wish I started living it sooner.

Isn’t it true for so many people that just when they discover that life can be interesting, rewarding, and filled with moments of pure joy, they no longer have the energy to experience life to the fullest.

“How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become – to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being. “
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

Many years ago my wife and I had the opportunity to ride a bike built for two for 2500 miles across many states.  Some of the people we talked to wished that they had done some the bold when they were younger but now it was too late.

Don’t let life pass you by.   Don’t get so caught up in the doing that your forget to live life and experience all of what it has to offer.  Just grabbing a piece of the life experience  is better than watching it go by.

Start living today … start experiencing the fullness of life today.   If not today when?

power words

Living a life by design is considered by many to be the preferred path towards greater happiness. We create our world and we interpret the world we live in by the words we choose to use. It is not how the world appears to us that matters, as it the way we describe that world. Words form pictures in our minds, pictures of what is, a picture of what is yet to be, and pictures of what was. These words and pictures bring either comfort or pain.

Words that can produce positive emotions like:

Gentle breeze

soft sounds

Peaceful waters

Delicate fragrance

Harmonious laughter

Calm, warm, pleasant, …

What words evoke a sense of peace, tranquility, and beauty?

In the 1965 motion picture “The Sound of Music” the power of words were used to describe how song, music can infect the soul with the meaning of song.

The hills are alive with the sound of music
With songs they have sung for a thousand years.
The hills fill my heart with the sound of music
My heart wants to sing every song it hears.
My heart wants to beat like the wings
Of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees,
My heart wants to sigh like a chime that flies from a church on a breeze,
To laugh like a brook when it trips and falls
Over stones on its way
To sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.
I go to the hills when my heart is lonely,
I know I will hear what I’ve heard before.
My heart will be blessed with the sound of music
And I’ll sing once more.

Words create moods and are used to describe moods.

What words do you use that are uplifting, freeing and enabling? What words do you use that are draining, tiresome, weighty and confining?

By choosing words that are an expression of creation, building, designing, freeing and liberating you will see your life tendencies and interpretations start to move towards more abundance.

For the next week alter your thoughts, choose words that are a more powerful description of what you want your world to look like. Become an artist and use words that are vibrant in color, deep in meaning, lofty in expression and filled with uncommon beauty.

believe in your success

That’s right believe in your success.    Picture yourself at the pinnacle of your dreams.  What does it look like?  What does success mean to you?

It may not be a life filled with financial riches.  In fact many wealthy people don’t find that their life was a success just because they were able to amass a great fortune.   Some find that at the end of their life what the desired most they didn’t get.   A life of riches isn’t the number of dollar bills you collect, it is the impact you have on others that matters.  

 

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted. “

Mother Teresa

Success can be defined by what you have given rather than what you have taken. 

 What do you think?

Defining Moments … Success