So this is it

Finally I am having fun in my life. Being a Capricorn I seem to live life backwards. I am living out experiences that many have in their teens and early twenties – back then I was too serious and intense to really enjoy myself.

I am also learning what it is like to actually be nurtured and cherished by someone. I am discovering how to openly, honestly and respectfully communicate in a deep and meaningful way. I’m learning not to hold things back, not to brood or stew. I am finding that no matter what I do or say or how I do or say it, I am accepted, forgiven, respected, admired, empathised with and yes, even loved. Regardless.

Far from pulling away from me the opposite has occurred. For once I actually feel I am the one least engaged in a relationship. That is bizarre especially in the circumstances. And yet, I feel the intensity coming at me is more than that going back. And I love it. It is empowering to encounter this.

I am being given affection, understanding, empathy, gifts, deep communication and connection. I am experiencing passion, intensity and wild, crazy zaniness. There is lots of laughter, some tears, dancing, singing, living…

I need this.  It is a neccessary step on my path of self growth. Surely it doesn’t always have to be hard work and pain? For now I am living in the moment, perhaps acting a bit recklessly at times, but I am feeling, experiencing, being. Yes I am still in my head rather too much but that is changing too. I thought I analysed a lot! I’m not the only one.

There is also much soul searching going on on both sides. There is a compulsion to this situation that may well pass with a bit more time. A lot of things won’t change and all of this will come to an end. Doesn’t everything? That is no reason to not go into something. Fear of it ending, fear of being hurt. Nobody truly lives if they live always within safety and comfort zones. What I am gaining, what we both are gaining, is immeasurable.

This may be a repeat pattern in some ways but it is like nothing I’ve ever known before. I am filled with gratitude for this opportunity.

Thank you

My heartfelt thanks to everyone of you for your comments and support in recent days, and in fact ever since I started this blog.  I’m profoundly amazed all the time by the wonderful people out here in the blogosphere.

Life goes on. I am doing ok – after all Rajah had left my life in every practical sense already – so my day to day routine stays the same. It came as a huge shock but I’m adapting. I wonder if he had a seizure (digging is a side effect apparently) and this wouldn’t surprise me as I always had a suspicion there might be something neurologically abnormal with him. I’ll never know, but he’s gone now and I’m accepting it.

I’ve been going to the gym six days a week, doing weights and cardio. I’ve been out and about with work a lot recently too. As I said, life goes on.

Life… this is it…

Yesterday I read a great post at The Naked Soul about our journey through life. This really made me pause and think.

Something that I realise at the intellectual level suddenly moved into the experiential ‘knowing’ level. Knowing in the heart rather than the head.

I am always waiting for my ‘real’ life, my meaningful life to begin. I have spent more years than I care to count (decades!) living in this way. When I get the more meaningful job… when I meet the right man… These are extremely common themes in my thinking.

But this is it. Right now. Right here. This IS my life right now. I never can fully appreciate what I have in my life – always something is missing. Yesterday I decided this was no way to live – this has to end.

I have a wonderful home that I love dearly. I have great friends and work colleagues. I have a fantastic and supportive family. I have a reliable and economical car. I have plenty of food to eat, clean water to drink and enough money to support my lifestyle and to allow me to travel occasionally. That’s the external stuff.

So I don’t find my work meaningful or stimulating and I don’t have a partner to share my life with. I do want those things but I don’t want to spend all my time waiting for them to turn up. Why can’t I appreciate and enjoy and live my life NOW. I put so much emphasis on having those two things in my life and I always have. And I’ve never had either for any length of time.

The problem is my definition of what society finds successful (and why am I so caught up in wanting that anyway?) Having a partner seems to me to be socially acceptable and normal. If you don’t have one (in my eyes) society deems something to be wrong with you. And if you aren’t busy climbing the career ladder and finding joy and meaning in your work then again (in my eyes) society says ‘wrong’!

Then I stop and take a look at my journey instead of these destinations, just as Tobeme highlights. I look back over my life and realise how far I have come in spiritual and personal growth terms. I have done a lot of inner work and continue to do so. I am most definitely a better person now than I was 20 years ago. Better in the sense of more compassionate, calm and mature. I have suffered a lot through my life but it is, like all suffering, self imposed in the final analysis. I have chosen to use my suffering to enable learning and growth.

The point here is not to rave on about how wonderful I am. Not at all. It is to remind myself that it is this daily process that is my life. This process – of suffering, of acceptance, of looking for the meaning and the lessons, of attempting to help others I come across – is living. I’ve been looking at life in the wrong way. I’ve looked at it as a series of destinations or goals or achievements or acquisitions. The job… my purpose… the man… the spiritual awareness… search for inner peace… the travel…

Yes, these are steps along the way. These are outcomes or processes or tools through which to develop. What I have failed to realise until now, is that my life is actually about every tiny little moment along the way. When I look at it from that perspective my life doesn’t seem anywhere near as bleak and meaningless. Maybe I can learn, starting now, to live in the present moment and not expect life to happen to me in the future. Maybe I can learn to be quietly happy and accepting of the many wonderful things in my life instead of always focussing on what I think is missing.

You know I get so much pleasure from living where I do, watching the birds come to eat my fruit and drink from the birdbath. Every day they are there. It might seem like a tiny thing in the scheme of things but it makes me joyful every single time. With things like this in my life how can I possibly think that I am lacking anything? I realise I am so lucky when I minutely examine things .

So thankyou, specifically to Tobeme, for being the catalyst for this realisation. And thankyou to everyone who reads and comments here and who writes amazingly insightful things on his/her own blog (so many of you out there!) It is time to recognise, with gratitude, all the blessings around me.

Catharsis

Just as I was publishing that last post came the wordpress message – “Sorry for the lack of notice, but we are performing some maintenance. Your dashboard is going to be unavailable for 17 mins”. Which then quickly became 35 minutes. And then another five. Talk about a freak out moment. Luckily I had had the foresight to copy and paste my post into notepad just prior to hitting the publish button. I don’t always do this but with such a long and personally important post I decided to be careful. Now I am waiting to see how much of my post actually was saved prior to wordpress going down. Luckily I have the whole thing saved locally. I  think I would really have cried if I’d lost that post. (later: I am so glad I saved that post locally – only the first three paragraphs had been saved by wordpress – huge sigh of relief).

Writing that letter to P has been incredibly carthartic for me. It never ceases to amaze me, or fill me with wonder, how writing saves my soul. It is incredibly therapeutic – moreso than anything else I’ve ever encountered. I’ve been feeling a bit sad and emotional for a couple of days now, reevaluating things after my trip away. A time of introspection in between two phases – holiday and work. Wondering, yet again, what it is I really want and knowing that there is still something lacking, missing.

Having written that letter, which by the way, P will never read (he knows I have a blog but not its name or whereabouts), I’ve processed and worked through some of these unexpected emotions that seem to have set out to waylay me. Talking it through with a friend would have taken much longer and not resulted in the same sense of release and acceptance. Brooding on it would have sent me spiralling downward. Distracting – getting out in the garden for instance – would also have helped, like it did yesterday, but I find the feelings are still there waiting later.

I washed the windows yesterday; they were getting so mucky I could barely see out. Now I have an uninterupted view of the birds in the birdbath. They love it. My apple, plum and pear trees are starting to shed their leaves and the colours of autumn in the garden are quite stunning. Golds, browns, oranges, greens, rusts. The light is soft and warm and my lawn is lush and green. It fills me with such peace and contentment. Life, close to nature is truly wonderful. The recognition of this is one of the many things P and I share.

I’ve been here alone for four days straight after 13 days away with other people constantly. That has triggered my feelings of aloneness again, and the sense of wanting someone to share things with on a more regular basis. That is the frame of mind I have been coming from the last few days. But now, again, I can see that my life is as it is meant to be right now. Perfect in its own way and with many things for which to be grateful. This view from my window being one of them.

Writing has again cleansed me, saved me, made me feel whole again. What a wonderful gift.

Humility

I have been humbled – in the beautiful and profound sense – by the wisdom of my fellow Aussie Guybrush57.

She left a comment that has totally blown me away. I’ll paste it in below to make it easier to refer to:

Sometimes, in dealings with men, I feel they know not what they do. Women generally look within themselves more and think, brood, invent scenaria … if left with too much time on their hands. Men would be surprised – maybe shocked – if they knew our thoughts on their offhand behaviour. I think we are better at playing games (therefore imagining men are playing them too), when probably men are just being men – busy with their work, play, etc., and compartmentalising their relationships into little boxes to be opened when they can spare the time. This is not to say men are not deep – but I do feel they operate on a different emotional bandwidth. Maybe P thinks it’s you who are not willing to commit? Sometimes we protest too much. You are travelling such an exciting journey, Zen … the possibilities are exquisite.

I just suddenly felt light and free after reading this. Like a load had been lifted from my mind. And I suddenly realised that the issue was all about ME, not about how anyone else was behaving. I think I’ve been blowing things out of all proportion.

P leads a very busy life. He has a very active social life where he is out many evening and weekends. He is also very dedicated and committed to his work and takes his job seriously. One of the things I really like about him is that he is so passionate about what he does. His grown children also have recently moved back in with him so he has an active family life too. He gets on so well with his kids and they enjoy spending time together.

He is getting on with his usual routine and his usual life. He would probably be horrified to know of all the thoughts that float around in my head based on how I perceive his behaviour.

Guybrush57’s timing was also impeccable as I’d remembered this morning that I have been trying so hard to learn to let go, go with the flow and surrender to life. I have been working to maintain an even balance emotionally and psychologically. Now, I have a test, a hurdle to overcome and have been stumbling around a fair bit. The universe looks down and says, “ok you say you are going to go with the flow – lets see if you can do that”, and throws a situation in your path that you cannot control. I must let go of this need to be in control. It is based on insecurity.

Let me learn to take each day as it comes. Let me learn to take each opportunity as it arises. Let me learn to accept things I cannot change. Let me learn to not judge another’s behaviour based on my own perceptions. Let me learn to love. Let me learn to be patient. Let me learn to let go and surrender to whatever will be.

I have been very judgemental in the last few days. Methinks I doth protest too much. Now I have been shown humility by the wisdom of others. I get so much from each and every person who comments here. I’m not sure how I survived before I joined this cyber-community. I am very grateful.

Namaste

Thankyou all

I have come home from work and find myself distraught. Again it has arisen from nowhere, triggered by nothing in particular. I lay sobbing on my bed after trying to make a few calls to friends. One was out, the other dashing out the door.

What is it all about anyway? I do not know.

So I came online. And there are the most beautiful comments awaiting me from Miss D and Aullori. I can tell you I am sitting here writing this bawling my eyes out but it is because there are others out there who understand and with whom I connect so deeply. And these two are not the only ones – they just happened to be right there

Thankyou to all of you out there. I love you all so much and can’t begin to express the positive difference you have made in my life.

PS. can you see the tear stains on your monitor? Hope it hasn’t smudged the ink

Blessed

I am blessed.

I have many loving, caring friends. I have met so many fantastic, supportive people here online. I connect with so many; know so many go through similar things. We are humans having human experiences – the joys, the sorrows; the ups and downs. This is life.

This is my life. I have made it this way. It is what it is. I need to accept that and let go of the idea it should be any different. It is because of my choices that my life is the way it is right this minute. I take full responsibility – it is nobody elses fault or credit. It is mine and mine alone.

I am the person I am today, for better or worse, because of this life I have been blessed with. Because of what I’ve experienced. If the going is tough then I will forge a new path. If it is sad, then I will learn to find the joy within sorrow. If it is painful then I will learn compassion. Every experience is a lesson with truth at the core of it. Life is a school through which we mould ourselves to become the best people we can be.

I wish to relax and flow with life instead of continually struggling. I wish to accept my life right now for what it is. Enjoy the moment rather than always looking to when things will be better. I have spent a lifetime looking always to the future for contentment, for peace, for tranquillity. It is time, now, to find those things within.

There is so much of beauty and wonder in my life. Right now. Now…

I am blessed.

2008 – New Beginnings

Happy New Year. Yesterday was a very hot day and the best place to spend the Eve was at the beach. The evening began with an exquisite sunset over the sea. The sea was turquoise and still, the sky all shades of pink and rose. The clouds were streaked with colour and whispy patterns and the setting sun formed a pool of molten gold on the horizon. Wow – talk about feeling glad to be alive! Champagne on a balcony overlooking the beach with a group of interesting people I’d never met before – fireworks up the coast in both directions and a balmy breeze to cool the heat. What more could I ask for to see in a new year and hopefully a new beginning? Thankyou to those people I met last night, for your interesting conversation (ranging from neuroscience to astronomy to the logistics of having sex underwater whilst diving Thank you to mother nature for the superb sunset show – much more vibrant and exciting than the fireworks displays at midnight. It is good to be alive in 2008 and looking forward to better things ahead. Best wishes to all.

Nectarfizz on joyful thoughts

Nectarfizz – Bekki – couldn’t have put into words better the way I feel sometimes. I am also a Capricorn who finds it hard to find someone to really understand her Yet there is much to be thankful for and I practise feeling gratitude as often as I can. I have so much…