Tuesday, June 10, 2014

December 31, 2013

Top 13 Lessons of Lucky/Unlucky 2013

Perhaps as a result of my years of scientific training, I really enjoy symmetry. So this morning, to reminisce on the close of 2013, I ran 13 miles in the brisk (but not icy or snow-packed) Tucson air. It’s been a year filled to the brim with change. With great change comes a barrage of unasked for lessons and “growing” opportunities. It’s the type of learning nothing but living can teach…the type of growing that is both imperceptible and immense. If you choose to read my Lucky/Unlucky Top 13 list for the year, you’ll probably strongly identify with something, say “well duh” to something else, and completely discount that other thing. Life looks different from inside each person, so it’s no wonder we can’t come up with an instruction manual!
1. It’s important to take time to think about your identity. Stay in touch with what currently makes you you, because it changes and can be easily confused with how others identify you or how your surroundings make you feel.
2. If your answer to the question “Who am I?,” is “I don’t know,” that’s ok. Don’t panic. Don’t obsess. Just go out and experience the world and be open to knowing yourself.
3. Being forced to live through one of your greatest fears can either make you hide from or seek out and destroy other fears, depending on how you choose to use the energy.
4.  The only person you are guaranteed to spend the rest of your life with is yourself. Be someone you like hanging out with one on one. Treat your relationship with yourself with respect, love, and patience, both mentally and physically.
5. True love has many forms. Its appearance can change and it can still be true. Duration is not an indication of truth. We are never made better by getting in the way of where love goes or how it gets there. Love happily coexists with itself and true love is made stronger by embracing all other true loves of the past, present, and future.
6. Sadness and self-pity love an audience. Take away the audience and it becomes easier to deny them power. Depression and anxiety are very real diseases, but have no place in your identity. You don’t have to be sad today because you were sad yesterday and your situation still seems the same. It’s ok if you are, but don’t make the decision ahead of time. Seeing something a little differently than you did yesterday doesn’t make your reason for being sad yesterday wrong.
7. There is a quote or saying or pretty picture that will affirm exactly what you want to believe about your situation…that doesn’t always mean you should!
8. Hope more, wish less. Hope is constructive and serves as a guiding force for decisions that impact tomorrow. Wishing is destructive and focuses on what you don’t have today. If you think about it and it makes you smile, keep it as a hope. If you think about it and it makes you sad, let go of it as a wish.
9. It’s ok to change your mind, and to change it back again. Just make sure you don’t overcompensate by fearing to commit to something you really do believe in when it’s challenged.
10. You never quite realize how important silent companionship is until your primary methods of communication become the phone and computer. The language may be the same, but the interpretation is far cloudier without sight and touch attached.
11. Beauty and adventure are absolutely everywhere. (This is really more a reaffirmation…) If you look for it, you will always find it. If you fail to seek it, you will never find it.
12. It is always better to give people the choice to accept or reject you as you are. Don’t make the choice for them, even if you think it’s to save them pain.
13. See people, not the boxes they put themselves in. Love. All. Ways.
Happy New Year!

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