It’s the kind of morning where the smallest things are hard. Got up, grabbed my favorite jeans and thought to grab my new shirt from camp. I had to laugh as I went to pick up my camp shirt and even it, the Design Your Life Tshirt, had been used by one of our pets when found on the floor where I put down the sack from traveling. The smallest of dogs in our house has to mark his territory religiously (isn’t it always the way, power must be asserted from the smallest?), and the new shirt was in his domain. Kind of sums up how the week is trying to be.
When stresses are oppressive for me it’s about simplifying, straightforward thinking and taking time to be appreciative at a focused level. So much of what we face is made harder or less difficult by how we perceive it in our minds and how we enact what we perceive. I’m a do-er…which means when stress comes at me hard, I tend to get busy. After all busy is the new black right?
There is enough within me and around me. That’s whether or not the government re-engages my husband’s paycheck. That’s whether or not I turned down a contract two weeks before said shutdown, that’s despite the realities we are facing financially currently. My business is secure, our projects still on-going. The skills we had before the furlough are still within us. I look in the newly dawned light of day and see that our cupboard is not bare, our home is comfortable, and despite every.fiber.within.me wanting to believe that somehow this national budget disruption to my life is somehow my fault and problem to fix, it just isn’t so.
I am responsible, however, for what I think, what I choose to believe, and how I enact what I believe. Money is a push button for me, for my whole life someone important to me said if I followed my creative skills it would bankrupt my world eventually. Apparently I still believe that to some level for despite the truths of IRS telling me differently, I still internally believe that my “creative projects” are not enough. Yesterday I spent several hours working on graphics for clients, more hours later coding for an issue that a web client is having, late hours working on a broken system someone else had engaged in their business and then called to say “can we now hire you to fix what we know now wasn’t a good choice…and yes, can you now build it the way it was going to be.” <sigh>. We have choices each day, and way I have found that works for me is to choose the best choice from the information you have at the time. Choices often seem dumb later, but then again, if you were ignorant of other opportunities or options, well, there just has to be self-kindness in the learning. As I like to repeat…”you just hadn’t learned that yet”…”I just haven’t learned that yet” when difficulties come. You can have the greatest product in the world but if you don’t learn how to sell it, and how to talk to those who are seeking it the disconnect will still be there in your failing. How often do I see just that in action in business? One moment the client is convinced it’s THEM, the next month, with a more appropriate audience experience, event experience, or time with a tribe…they realize it was just experience and marketing skills lacking not their ability, soul, or some deep dark secret lacking in their existence.
In my faith, God asks me to trust Him, to follow His provision for my life, my thinking, my hope, and my heart. The child in me wishes to wail, to writhe, and to wallow when tough things come, and yet nothing makes a mess go faster than pitching in and facing whatever it is that creates fear, discomfort, or unrest. The dance of avoidance doesn’t make the frustrations lessen, the seething rants don’t calm my heart or still my mind. Darn it every.single.time I spend time with a perspective of thankfulness, even if I begrudgingly start the list…despair may hang out for a while, but the choice to see, think, and remember what is good, lovely, and right in my world displaces the despair each time.
Choosing is a choice. Whether the topic is what pair of jeans to put on today or what attitude to engage, it is wholly within us to choose….and even not choosing….is a choice.
