So I was doing some internal work a while ago about money. Now, as it happens, I have a pretty good relationship with money. I like money, I usually have enough, I don’t mind paying bills and since I always pay my bills on time, I have a very sexy credit score.But I couldn’t help noticing that while I always had enough money, I never had more than enough. My standard of living hasn’t changed much in the past 20 years, and I was feeling like I’d like to participate more fully in the economy; I want to buy stuff.
I took a piece of paper and started writing down all the ways I thought I was about money: thrifty, smart, easy, responsible, careful, respectful, appreciative. All well and good. But what about the opposite? What about the ways I thought I wasn’t allowed to be about money?
I started going with the idea that “what you can’t be with, runs you.” In other words, if you can’t stand the idea of being rude, then you spend your whole life in terror of rudeness, and you let your fear of rudeness make your decisions for you. But if you can admit that (sometimes) you are rude, then you can just go about your generally-polite life aware that sometimes rudeness happens, and that’s OK. (Especially if you apologize afterwards.)
So what do I think I can’t be around money? Hmmm: irresponsible, careless, profligate, reckless, wasteful, disrespectful, ungrateful… With each word I made a picture in my mind of me behaving in that way. Irresponsible? Yes, I could definitely think of a time or two that had happened. Careless? Certainly. Profligate? Well, not really, but I sort of liked the image that appeared in my mind of me just throwing money around, buying stuff without looking at the pricetag – very Auntie Mame. This was fun. Then. Then. Then I wrote down the word “thief.”
Well. Clearly a person can’t be a thief. That would just be wrong. But I was committed to my “opposites” game, so I started to think, “where in my life am I a thief?” And it came to me:
The quarter-inch of lotion in the bottle I couldn’t bring myself to throw away or replace, because there was still some left.
The freebie lipstick that was the wrong color but I kept it anyway.
The clothes in my closet that don’t fit.
The time I stole from my writing to ditz around doing nothing much at all.
Those items – the ones I was hanging on to out of a sense of “thrift” – were STEALING from me! They were stealing my time, my attention, my space, even my ability to liberally apply lotion after my morning shower!
And I was stealing my own art right from under my nose.I was the thief, stealing from myself over and over again.
I was stealing my ability to live in the moment. I was even stealing my faith in the future. I was stealing away from myself the thought that maybe, if I got rid of the junky bit of lotion or the ugly lipstick or the ill-fitting clothes, that there would still be enough to go around. That I could “splurge” on new clothes that fit the body I live in right now. I was stealing the 15 minutes a day I could be spending working on my book – which also meant stealing my integrity.
That’s what my misplace sense of thrift was really stealing: my ability to live in full integrity in this moment. Right Now.
As you are probably old enough to know: Right Now is all we have.
Right Now is the whole banana. We all have friends who have left this earth – they don’t have a Right Now anymore. (Perhaps they are in an eternal Right Now?) But we have Right Now, and we deserve to have items in our lives that suit our life Right Now.
So stop saving things “for good” – use the good silver every day.
Stop keeping clothes that don’t fit – someone else needs them.
Stop fretting – spending 10 minutes debating the relative merits of one shampoo that’s 50 cents cheaper than another shampoo is NOT the highest and best use of your time.
Stop wasting time on television shows you’ve already seen. Don’t let TV or video games be a thief.
And finally, stop pretending that you not spending the time or money on your ART that you know it needs and deserves in order to come full flower is somehow a good idea. Don’t be the thief of your own creativity.
Find the thieves in your world and give them a big hug and kiss and let them go.
Right Now needs you.
The Solitude Cure
There is no real cure for loneliness.
Except to transform it into solitude.
Solitude is remembering that there has never, ever been a single (solitary) person like you.
You arrived alone
You’ll die alone.
And in between those two things, you will be having a discreet, one-of-a-kind experience of the world.
Everyone has that “among them but not of them” feeling, at least sometimes. And creative people feel it more often, I think, than most.
Everyone yearns for connection, comfort, fusion, total immersion. We read books where people fall in love and “become as one” and we think we should have that feeling ourselves.
But that only happens in fiction.
So.
The cure is to embrace the separation. Enjoy the space. Hold yourself slightly apart. After all, you already feel apart, so go ahead and exaggerate that feeling a little bit. Observe the world around you. Retreat into your own skin and observe you having your very own point of view on the world.
That isolated, personal point of view is where your art comes from. So go ahead and create something inspired by this particular vantage point. It doesn’t have to be any good, and you don’t ever have to show it to anyone. Just go ahead and let something flow.
And now you have the real cure for solitude: art.
While a lot of the coaching and free-advice giving I do is about making sure that you spend at least 15 minutes per day on the creative work that makes you happy, this bit is about attending to all those dumb, pesky details that can make your world feel like a dumb, pesky place to be.
For example, let’s take my client, Kevin. Kevin is a an actor – one of those good-looking-California-surfer types. He’s a hard-working member of a Los Angeles theatre company, and he occasionally books television and film work, usually playing a good-looking-California-surfer type.
Here’s Kevin’s list of dumb, pesky things:
-
Get the car washed
-
Clear off desk
-
Take “Opening Night” outfit to the dry cleaners
-
Clear out the nightstand drawer
-
Scrub the tile grout in the tub
-
Call Angela – her birthday was ages ago!
-
Check DWP website about drip irrigation program
-
Put scuba gear in garage – get it out of the bedroom
-
Throw out holey underwear
-
Wipe down patio furniture
Now, how long do you suppose these items had been on Kevin’s list?
Here’s Kevin’s embarrassing secret: nothing on that list was less than three months old, and some of them (nightstand drawer) had been on his to-do list for over five years. We can all point and snicker and laugh, but be honest, how many days or weeks or months have your to-do items been hanging around?
Now part of me wants to say to Kevin, “Look, clearly you don’t really give two hoots about getting your car washed, so why not just cross it off your list entirely and move on to a more interesting problem?”
But the fact is, it bothers him.
None of it bothers him very much, but all of them bother him a little.
So every morning Kevin wakes up, looks at his overflowing nightstand drawer and thinks that he should have cleaned that out already. Then he goes to the shower and cringes at the sight of his grubby tile grout. Then he gets dressed, rooting around for intact underwear, trips over the scuba gear, walks past his messy desk on which, somewhere, is his friend Angela’s phone number and he walks past the suit that’s waiting to go to the dry cleaners and he exits his home and notices the dried-out lawn and the grimy patio furniture and he gets in his dirty car and drives to work.
The poor man hasn’t been awake for 45 minutes and he’s already feeling terrible about himself.
That’s why I want you to take care of these niggling things. Not because anyone cares if your car is dirty, but because it’s affecting your self-esteem, and it’s affecting your ability to believe in yourself. “How can I start the project of my dreams when I can’t even find matching socks!” Well, perhaps you can’t.
So make a list of ten little things that:
- you know need doing
- you know that if you did them it would make positive difference in your life
- you’ve been putting off for some mysterious reason
You must keep this list to truly “little” things. Things that cost
less than $50. Things that take less than one hour to complete.
Things that might even be considered “errands.”
Now, schedule some time to complete these tasks. Might be 15 minutes a day, might be one whole day devoted to the whole list, might be delegating these tasks (yes! delegate!)
Let me know how it feels.
I’d love to hear what niggling little thing you’ve been putting off, and how it felt to finally get it done.
I Can’t Go On. I Can’t Go On. I’ll Go On., ww… by samanthabennett222
Design a refrigerator magnet With zazzle
View other Motivational Magnets “>
When you find yourself all bummed out and thinking dire my-life-is-a-failure-type thoughts, my advice is to wallow in the feelings and ignore the thoughts.
HOW TO WALLOW
Cry.
Beat the mattress with a whiffle bat.
Run around the block as fast as you can.
Re-read a book you find comforting and transportive (Sci-fi? Romance? This is not the time to be an intellectual, here, people – we’re looking for comfort.)
Watch a movie, and not one of those “good for you” movies, either.
Work out.
Paint.
Scribble.
Write poetry (you know you want to…and you can call it “song lyrics” if you want)
Clean out your closet – be merciless.
Sleep, baby.
Write letters to the universe, pouring your heart out.
Go to a 12-step meeting.
Get down on your knees and pray.
Weed the garden.
Fingerpaint.
Listen to Fiona Apple or your personal equivalent.
Comfort food!
Re-read books you’ve read before.
Watch home improvement/animal/decorating shows on TV – shows where nothing bad ever happens.
The idea is to burn off the fog of feelings with the sunshine of energy.
You wouldn’t let an over-tired child make an important decision, would you?
Of course not – you would distract that child with something soothing and fun until they were calm enough to move forward.
So, when you’re in the grip of strong feelings, be your own good parent.
How do you like to wallow?
Don’t go grocery shopping when you’re hungry.
Don’t call ex-lovers when you’ve been drinking.
Don’t think when you’re feeling.
Let’s say you have a disappointing day. Everything is going wrong. Bills, parking, people, money, friends, the very streets seem to be out to get you. You feel alone, sad, furious, frustrated, exhausted and forgotten. You think, “That’s it. I’ve had it.” And you decide to turn your back on your life and start over.
The thought of which depresses you even further.
Or maybe you’re ill, or in physical pain. My friend Chris gets a cold and suddenly his whole life feels like a pathetic joke in which nothing good can ever happen. When his body is weak, his thinking gets weak, and it’s hard to ignore the dark thoughts that are one of his “symptoms.”
Or maybe your illness is actually a hangover; post-alcoholic depression is no joke. Even if you are not suffering from the physical effects of drinking too much, your brain may be. And in it’s weakened condition, your brain is liable to throw out an awful lot of negative thoughts. It’s perilously easy to believe negative thoughts when you’re hung over.
Or perhaps you are in the middle of a truly awful situation. When you have lost something or someone you love, be it a person, an animal, a place, a job, a relationship, or even just your idea of the person you thought you were, you will grieve. According to the Greeks and Sam Christensen “Grief is the Daughter of Anger and Sadness” and “Revenge is the Son of Anger and Sadness,” – an evocative conceptualization, huh? When we are caught in the strong tides of circumstance and emotion, our cognition is affected. And not, as you’ve probably noticed, for the better.
Has this happened to you? When we’re in the extremes of an emotion, it’s all too easy to tie those emotions to thoughts, and those thoughts certainly feel real. But they are not. The thoughts you have when you are operating at a low vibration are a fraud. They are the devil, sneaking in when you’ve left the doorway of despair open even a little bit.
People who make decisions when they’re upset are called Drama Queens. They live in a turbulent, tumultuous world in which nothing can be relied upon, because they allow their ever-shifting feelings to make their decisions for them.
In the same way that alcoholics and addicts constantly “change the rules,” Drama Queens also create an environment in which no one ever knows how they will be received. Will there be hugs and kisses and a face wreathed with smiles? Or glowering? Or mean-spirited remarks? When people come to understand that they cannot rely on you, then will begin to avoid you. Maybe not right away, but eventually they will decide that your erratic, unpredictable behavior is just more trouble than it’s worth. You have become a person without integrity.
So, you know…Don’t be that way.
If you’re feeling low, you have a few choices: you can just lay low, you can can wallow in it (see “How To Wallow”) or you can try to keep your chin up and soldier on. But really, don’t make any big decisions or rash moves until you’re done feeling your feelings, OK?
NOTE: If you’re feeling low for more than two weeks, go see your doctor and don’t leave that doctor’s office until you’ve gotten some help.
So, what lessons have you learned about “not thinking while you’re feeling”?
