Currie's Gratitude 30 June 2013

If only I’d learned to love this idea BEfore I was old enough to NEED a nap again… lions and tigers and bears OH MY!!!

Yet the important piece/peace is I get it. Now. I embrace it. Now. And I DO it. NOW!!!

I’ve learned, too, that a nap is NOT always or even usually about going to bed and to sleep for awhile during the awake time of my day. Who knew?! Did YOU?! I surely wish, if you DID, that you’d told me…

A nap is a wee time out in the midst of living a day. It might include sleeping. Or lying down. Or bed. Yet really it is more a state of mind and BEing that pauses. Stops. Turns off. Unplugs. RESTS. Until energy and motivation and inspiration are back running at peak capacity.

When Timmy was little and still took naps, sometimes a couple of them, I used those times to rush about and DO and very rarely had the wisdom to rest. To pause. To refresh my own batteries. I remember vaguely thinking it would BE a good time for me to take advantage of yet I took the wrong sort of advantage.

Nowadays a nap can BE just sitting and looking out the window awhile.

Or simply and quietly pausing.

Refreshing. 

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 29 June 2013

This is sometimes the easiest AND the hardest thing to remember OR to DO. Anger is such an explosive force that all sense and sensibility leave. Vanish. In fact, I might imagine they don’t EVEN show up.

A thing about anger and me is that for the longest time I did NOT realise that the deep hurting I felt so often was anger. I thought anger looked more in command of things. I suppose I did NOT think I WAS angry.

I equated anger with someone BEing in [or having] control. Anger equals Power. People could BE and often WERE angry with me, but I hadn’t the wherewithal to return anger, I could only BE hurt.

This, of course, had me always at a disadvantage. Feeling like the victim. And it surely kept me from learning to WAIT when anger was at the helm. Yet slowly, and perhaps only through long stretches of Solitude and Reflection, did I BEcome acquainted with my own anger. It surely had eluded me…

The waiting part had always seemed like a commonplace rule. Don’t react. Don’t engage. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. So I didn’t catch onto my tendency to act out IN the midst of my anger until it had BEcome something I just DID. Something I thought was just how I was/am… 

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 28 June 2013

Sometimes it’s the simplest direction that eludes me. That is where this one has ALWAYS come in and served me so remarkably well.

I used to want to write. I used to want to learn how to edit photos and how to make digital art. I say “used to” BEcause Now I no longer want to DO or learn or BE. I DO write. I DO edit photos. I AM making digital art. Every. Single. Morning.

Right Here. FOR sharing with YOU.

What changed is I BEgan just DOing these things. Daily. In the same way and at the same time. And Now I have BEcome someone I feel fits inside of my skin. Someone who DOES the things that make her happy, purposeful, and free of the I WANT I WANT I WANTs.

I recently completed a book of my Gratitude from my 60^th year. From when I BEgan to post this email into a blog.

I wanted to write a book, but assumed I had to have a story to tell or something to write about and that the process would require something that looks far more like w-o-r-k than this simple JOYous way I BEgin my days.

Ahhhhhhh… The sweetness of BEing wrong. Turns out I did it by simply DOing the next thing.

Repeatedly. 

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 27 June 2013

It has taken me several chaotic years to see how much I rushed to keep myself “crazy busy” with the most insignificant things just to feel there was some purpose for my continued existence. It’s both sad and embarrassing.

At the BEginning of my new Life with just Gracie and me, I clung to the many things I felt I MUST DO NOW in order NOT to feel my feelings of uselessness. I made myself a bit of a martyr [talk about embarrassing admissions…] and took to the role with flourish.

Oh my…

Now, on the other hand, I deLIGHT in the quiet and simple way I’ve built this new Life, MY Life. I love my pre-dawn time here, with YOU, writing, digital fiddling, and reaching BEyond the Wee Cottage, Gracie, and me.

[I even love it when it starts at the wholly unlovable hour of 2-something, like today. I just read awhile until I am ready to get up and BEgin.]

I had a wonderful confluence yesterday where I was winding down and received one phone call from my mum and while we were talking, another from my son. It was a gentle easing into my evening. No fuss. No have-to. No martyr nonsense.

I realise that rushing around is a choice I made make no more. 

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 26 June 2013

Were I to choose one trait that I’d like to develop every second for the rest of my Life, this is it. BEing kinder than necessary is one of those BE the Change things I’d like to BE The Change I WANT to see in the World.

Kindness isn’t really half so hard as unkindness. In fact, kindness is an easy thing, a true default setting I think we come with fresh from the Bean Factory.

If each person walking on this planet were to BE kinder than necessary, I would imagine we would no longer see war, deceit, segregation, or any sort of winner and loser power struggle.

I know. It’s a BIG statement. It’s also probably simplistic and naïve, but I’d stake my Life on it.

Kindness is like the wind. You canNOT always see it, nor can you exactly point to it to define its edges, yet it is immediately recognisable and understood.

And then of course there is the “than necessary” piece of this BE Kinder Than Necessary. What is Enough?! What is Necessary?!

It is NOT important to have this “right” but it is clear as the bright blue sky when we’re NOT Enough of this simple human necessity.

If in doubt, I say BE kindER. I don’t think you can go wrong… 

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 25 June 2013

This appears to BE a sort of rite of passage from BEing a Me-Me-Me toddlerish bean to more of a tiny person bean, but it took me a whole lot longer in Life to BE comfortable [NOT to mention willing] enough to let anyone else go BEfore me [Me-Me-Me].

And I am NOT afraid to let it BE known I STILL struggle with this one. NOT so much daily as at those times I least suspect it.

Letting others go first, like BEing a better listener, talking less, and BEing Kind, BEing Kind, BEing Kind is unnatural for me. I’m inclined toward the path of default, least resistance, even what is merely comfortable. [this is NOT a proud declaration, by the way…]

BEcause of my inclination I can BE the “elephant in the room” that never comes into the conversation about WHY things are going [or NOT going] the way they are going [or NOT] in any particular time or situation.

In fact this little whatever-you-call-it showed itself to me yesterday in a sort of unusual flash of decision on my part. Rather than make a choice of ease and quick resolution, I chose to delay by making an appointment.

It’s good to stretch and take this sort of risk to grow by NOT putting myself first.

REALLY. 

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 24 June 2013

I try really hard sometimes to recall something from my childhood, some salient something that will help explain myself to me. Almost always I find something altogether else.

What I learned as a child seems as remote to me Today as DO most things that happened 50+ years ago. Even if I could hold it in my hands, it would BE like trying to hold a bubble.

One thing I remember HAVING as a child is Show & Tell. I canNOT remember any one in particular, but I KNOW I had them.

In the Spirit of a good Show & Tell, I have been trying to narrow down my choices of what to bring with me to share. 

Here. With YOU. Now.

And I realise every morning when I sit to write this I am Showing Up and Telling. Something. 

Even if the words don’t wrap round that Something nicely and neatly, I feel the same as if they did. Or could.

I come Here in the mornings. First thing. 

And I write. I make a little bit of art. I put it together and email it. 

Then publish it to www.iloveyoucurrie.blogspot.com and go on with the rest of my NOT so extraordinary yet deLIGHTfully ordinary little Life.

I make these little Show & Tells just for YOU.  

I love you, Currie