Happy Sunday Everyone:
Kim and I drove to one of our best friends mom’s celebration of life yesterday. It was of course sad, but also awesome. The event was 2.5 hours away, Kim and I decided to drive back vs. stay the night. We spent half the time listening to The Book of Joy by the Dalia Lama/Desmond Tutu and the other 1/2 of the drive talking about us, our family, work, and all that is happening in everyone’s lives, which seems more chaotic than ever, and some of the positives coming from it all.
One thing that came up for me was being grateful for change. This is new news from my camp. I’ve been pissed off, depressed, etc…about my team being remote, lot of my company stuff being remote, less time with people in the flesh (I know this has been a theme in these thoughts and I’ll stop, you’re probably tired of reading about it and I’m tired of writing about it). I still can’t say I enjoy it, and I don’t plan to accept it forever but it pushed me to think. My biggest “aha” moment, which I’m not really going to discuss much today is my need to look within vs. looking for everyone else to make changes to fit my needs. I have a level of clarity I’ve never possessed before around the need to work on me vs. the need to work on other people. Net net, working on me, allows me to not be so impacted by changes other people make that might have “some” impact on my world. If I’m really good with me first, the rest is secondary. I don’t mean for that to sound as selfish as it probably does, I only mean that I hold the keys to my internal castle, and to get those doors unlocked first will allow for everything else to fall in place. Perhaps this doesn’t sound like new news to you, and it doesn’t “sound” like new news to me either but truly understanding this vs. saying it, I’m realizing are two very different things.
I think I came to this point by realizing something I wrote in my journal a few weeks ago, I was looking at everything in my life, including my own well-being, as an inconvenience to all things work related, including things totally out of my control. This thought/feeling is a 100% my own issue. Certainly no one around me pushed that on to me but when I recognized it, I just thought to myself “how freaking dumb are you”, and then the combination of all these events with our friends/family, it was a perfect storm in questioning my priorities and where I was putting so much focus. I find myself getting less angry/agitated toward others and their actions, and just asking myself “how does that affect me?”…and usually coming to the same conclusion of ‘it doesn’t”….so don’t put anything toward it. Net net-the word “fix” isn’t the right word for me, the right word is contentment. There is an African proverb that says “when there is no enemy within, the enemy on the outside can do you no harm”. I’d like to make that a little more positive and just say “we dial ourselves in first, the rest will fall into place later”.
For the record-I said too deep for sending, editor (Kim/wife) said hit the send button.
Happy Sunday!