It's been a minute...
It’s been a minute since I had the trifecta needed for me to write a blog or send an email to this amazing group that follows me or enrolled for updates. What is the trifecta? Time, Inspiration, and Peace. My hat’s off to all those writers who meet deadlines, create on cue, and can tune out the noise of life to put pen to paper, or at least fingers on a keyboard.
While it is a creative outlet, writing for me has always needed those three magic ingredients…all at once. Sometimes, I have felt at peace, but not had the time, or had a “free” Sunday, but not felt inspired. If I am going to write, and then send it out for others to take their time to read, it should be real, heartfelt, and full to the brim with inspiration.
This last weekend I held a women’s retreat, the first of many Heroic Joy Retreats and it was everything I could have wanted and more. Just twelve women of every age group. I literally think we had someone in their teens, 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s - how amazing is that! We were all from different decades, different backgrounds, different perspectives on life. Yet, it was not what made us unique or different that brought us together. It is what we have in common and what untapped potential we have inside each of us. That is what we focused on, and so much more; A collective desire to hit the reset button, reflect, grow, spend time away from our everyday surroundings and create moments of magic and memories as we felt united. Every one of you reading this, and every one of us across this world have endured, persevered and continue to navigate the rapids of this river called life.
While most of my time near the water has been spent by the beach and not a river, a river does feel like a great metaphor for life at the moment. It moves, twists, turns, has areas where the water rushes and feels tumultuous and other times flows gently with stillness. It always moves forward; it is connected to greater bodies of water and to the whole. What happens behind us as we travel along it seems to propel us forward, sometimes with joy and other times with sorrow – but always with experience.
It is that experience that inspires me today. As challenging as the last few years have been personally, it pales in comparison to the pain others have borne. Today, I find myself torn between the gratitude that I have not lost a family member, that my children are adults who did not miss out on any of their school years, that my businesses continued to expand. And those feelings of appreciation exist aside the heavy, heart-wrenching reality of my closest friend who lost the love of her life, another who balanced working and keeping their children in front of school zoom classes, struggling to keep them engaged and herself employed, and others whose business closed permanently.
The experience of juggling the levity of gratitude with the weight of despair is what inspired me. The word Inspire … in-spire… means to awaken the spirit within us, to be in spirit, divinely influenced. There have been times in my past where I have felt inspired for months on end, but these last few years didn’t allow for it and it has taken a minute, or thousands of minutes, to reconnect to that inspiration for longer periods of time. The ups and downs, ebb and flow, and polarity of so many things in the last few years compelled me, inspired me to start a non-profit. (The full story on that is to be saved for a different day:). What I wanted to share today is that your experience, your everyday challenges, the menial tasks and massive projects, the joy of love and the anguish of loss all give you fuel. Fuel and Feelings. Even in our grief we can be grateful for the ability to feel, to have loved so hard that pain grips us. And fuel, to feel, think, act, and DO. Do anything that reminds us we are alive and forging forward, rowing along the river.
Ironically, as I close out this little essay, I am reflecting on another favorite quote that is very fitting. “Row, don’t drift.” If life is like a river, and we are along for the ride then row. Use that amazing initiative and desire that resides in your soul. Pull, paddle, steer, or swim if need be, but I beg of you to move in the direction of your dreams – whatever they are today. They deserve you, and the rest of the world needs it too.
And remember that while rowing is so very important, so is flowing... a topic for the next blog 😊
A few questions to ask yourself to help you Row:
At the beginning of each day ask, “What is one thing I can do, with what I have right now to move in the direction of my goals and dreams?”
Before the end of each day, did I do something today that was an intentional and specific step toward reaching my goals?
Who can I enlist to be a joy and achievement partner who you can share your vision with every day? Remember, the more we define our vision, communicate our vision, we become our vision.