Category: choices

Can we help?

by worrylessjourney, posted in accountable, answers, choices, consequences, help, kindness, misunderstanding

In life, we often want to help someone who doesn’t want help. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes trying to help is the wrong thing to do. But sometimes they genuinely need help and there are many reasons why they might refuse.

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Pride can frequently get in the way of accepting help. Many of us were raised to believe that taking help obligates us to return the favor to the person who helped.  Over the time that I have lived I have become a big proponent of “paying it forward.” We don’t have to be beholding to the specific person but we are called to help someone else in the future. However,we should never feel obligated but take the opportunities when they present themselves..

I know for sure that I can get the bit between my teeth and be determined to finish something myself. I can push away anyone who really wants to lighten the load. I want to “do it myself” like a three year old.

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When people turn us away from helping it is difficult to know when is the right time to push and when we should just back away. I really can’t guess myself. It is an individual determination. I wish I had some crystal ball but I don’t. I do know that there are times that I have had to back away or lose any chance to remain a friend or help later.

Don’t mess with Mother Nature

by worrylessjourney, posted in accountable, anxiety, choices, consequences, danger, death, important, medical, perspective, responsible, understanding

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The new virus that has risen out of China is just an example of how vulnerable we are. People travel the globe and it is so easy for someone who is infected to travel before they know they are sick.

It is very likely that some time in the future we will suffer a pandemic. There have been pandemics in the past…affecting the known world. They did a good job of culling the population.

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With the earth being past it’s ability to manage the number of people I do wonder if this would be its way of fighting back. Maybe we have messed too much with Mother Nature.

Live now!

by worrylessjourney, posted in acceptance, answers, choices, consequences, frustration, habits, learn, let go, life, Live!, understanding

rilke quoteI have this quote hanging where I can see it when at my desk. It is so powerful. There is always so much that we don’t or can’t understand and we can chew on it over and over. Rilke says that we have to let it go and gradually we will be able to live into the answers.

If we persist chewing on them we can’t move forward. We have to LIVE today. We can’t be obsessing over things we don’t understand. Let it go.

Small steps

by worrylessjourney, posted in acceptance, choices, coping, impatience, learn, little things, perspective, small steps

The small things matter. Many times we look at the “plan” or the “big Picture” and forget that there are many steps to get there. Then we get discouraged when it takes time to come to fruition.

Nothing is accomplished without the small steps. Nothing gets done without us putting in the work. To get an education we have to study, to learn a skill we have to practise. Nothing worthwhile is done without work.

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The small steps get us there.

Hospice: a hope for peace

by worrylessjourney, posted in acceptance, balance, choices, coping, perspective

Hope. Not a tangible things but real none the less. Hope can transform us. Help us to live each day. I think that’s why Emily Dickinson called it “the thing with feathers.” It can make us fly.

I know that some times there doesn’t seem to be any hope but I wonder if it has to do with what we hope for. As a nurse I have seen patients who don’t have a chance to survive what they are going through. No hope as they or family can see and hope for life is not there. There may be a different kind of hope. Hope that we find in the programs from Hospice. Hope that death can be better than the alternative.

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I don’t know how I got so deep into this topic but I have seen those for whom death would be a blessing. It’s not the plan any of us want but some day it will come. I “hope” that when it does we can find acceptance, love and a peaceful end.

Coping

by worrylessjourney, posted in acceptance, anxiety, balance, choices, control, coping, depression, emotions, feelings, learn, problems

Life can be challenging. Sometimes things become overwhelming and we feel as if we are drowning. The feeling that one more thing will put you over the edge is awful. When that happens we have to use any tools we have in our tool box to bring us back from the edge. Many ideas have been brought up in the blogs on Word Press and I have tried many of them. Some work and some don’t. The good news is that we can try different things and see what works for us.

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My granddaughter says that every school should teach Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. She says that all children need to learn the skills that are taught in that program. I suspect  she is right. There are so many issues cropping up with children today that we have to change something.

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I feel that I was lucky to have learned many coping skills from my mother but I am not sure that many people have that advantage today. We are such a society of quick fix that we don’t learn to cope with anything. One of the doctors that I worked for said that what people want is to come to a drive-in window and have the doctor reach out and say “heal” and it will be done.

Coping is learned when faced with real life. If we think that nothing should ever go wrong we are much mistaken. I worry about people who have never faced up to a major problems as they have not learned how to cope.

Evaluating

by worrylessjourney, posted in acceptance, balance, children, choices, decisions, moderation, stress

Next week I have signed up for two tasks at the Mediation Center. One is a Community Conference with two children involved and the other is a standard mediation. The Community Conferences (I’ll call them CC) are hard. It is so sad to work with these teens and hope to get them to see there are better ways to deal with conflict that violence. In some ways I am not looking forward to it. I will keep on doing them for now and may have to evaluate if it is for me.

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The other mediation is simple and sometimes it can be too simple but there is not stress involved. It is hard to weigh them against each other. I will just keep on for now and see how this goes.

Is church still relevant?

by worrylessjourney, posted in belief, change, choices, church, consequences, decisions

Matthew Fox writes:

The crises we find ourselves in as a species require that as a species we shake up all our institutions—including our religious ones—and reinvent them. Change is necessary for our survival, and we often turn to the mystics at critical times like this. Jung said: “Only the mystics bring creativity into religion.” [1] Jesus was a mystic shaking up his religion and the Roman empire; Buddha was a mystic who shook up the prevailing Hinduism of his day; Gandhi was a mystic shaking up Hinduism and challenging the British Empire; and Martin Luther King, Jr. shook up his tradition and America’s segregationist society. The mystics walk their talk and talk (often in memorable poetic phraseology) their walk. [2]

Fox wrote this a while ago but it is right on target. We do have to change. People are complaining about church. They say it is not relevant. They say the members are hypocrites. We have lost some idea of what it is all about. We need to look again with fresh eyes at the gospel. We need to think clearly about Jesus’s words and what he did. We need to reinvent ourselves and renew what it is all about.

Mistakes

by worrylessjourney, posted in advice, choices, consequences, learn, mistakes

I have three children. They are all in their 50’s now and that is hard to believe. They were born 3 years apart making the oldest 6 years older than the youngest. When they were about 10, 13 and 16 there was fun conversation going on at dinner one night. The kids were taking about each other’s mistakes…the older two pointing fingers at each other debating who had made the worst mistakes.

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Somewhere during the conversation the two of them realized that they had not said anything about the youngest…..and they couldn’t think of anything to say about her. One of them, frustrated that they couldn’t point at her asked: “Why don’t you make many mistakes?”

 

 

She responded: “I watch what the two of you do and don’t make the same mistakes.” An amazing piece of wisdom from a 10 year old. We could all learn from her.

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Too often we can’t see the wisdom of learning from the mistakes of others. If we did the world would be a better place. That is what history teaches us if we are willing to pay attention. Don’t make the same mistakes with the same outcome. Learn from the past and from the mistakes of others.

Live your beliefs

by worrylessjourney, posted in accountable, belief, choices, compassion, consequences, frustration, misunderstanding, problems, true story

A number of years ago my husband and I had a house that we rented. Some people moved in and at first it was perfect. They paid rent on time and the house (from the outside) looked good.

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As time went on the husband told us that his wife was sick and they would be late with the rent. This went on with them occasionally paying something on the rent. My husband and I felt sorry for them to be going through such a tough time.

Then it got to where they were paying no rent but continued to tell us their many problems. We were worried but we were too kind to put them out. Two of their grown sons came and went along with other relatives. Now we were more worried. Then one day they came and told us they were moving. This actually was a relief. They left and we went into the house. Things were damaged everywhere. It took much money and lots of work on our part to fix the house up to rent again. We later learned that the sons were selling drugs from the house.

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Now we could haunt ourselves with how stupid we were to let this happen. And you are right…we shouldn’t. But here’s the thing…we consider ourselves to be good people….worthy of being called Christian and that is how we live. We wouldn’t let that happen again but they were the bad people not us.

I know that they left saying how dumb we were but being told of the wife’s illness ( and she really was sick) we lived out our commitment to be compassionate. It gives us a twinge once in a while but we lived what we believe.