Recently, I had lunch with a very intelligent friend who is basically in the same boat as I am now. He is in his 30’s, he is divorced and he has a child. During that lunch, we had an interesting discussion about life after divorce because we both found we had the same attitudes about what we want or expect in life from this point on. We both are not in a hurry to find another partner like some people and we both basically have no expectations of anything but yet we both are very optimistic because it has become important for us to do everything for all the right reasons.

See, when we were in our 20’s we had expectations about how our lives were supposed to proceed. We felt that our “jobs” were to find that someone we would marry, have kids with and buy a house with and what happened after that didn’t really matter because those simple tasks were what was most important. Otherwise, our lives were not complete. That was our first mistake. Having such specific expectations in life doesn’t leave a lot of room for finding true happiness.

Now, however, maybe because we already accomplished those things or maybe because we have kids or maybe just because we are wiser, we do not have those expectations and definitely don’t feel our lives are incomplete without those things. I’m not sure why, but I seriously have no expectations when it comes to relationships in my life now. I would be happy to have one but what it looks like, I really don’t care mainly because this time, it will be healthy and for the right reasons. I don’t expect to live with them or marry them. If things progress along nicely, though, I won’t, by default, object to those things but I just don’t think they are as necessary as I used to. But, I am definitely not living my life for nor expect those things to happen.

I told a friend of mine a long time ago that I didn’t want to be in a relationship and he didn’t believe me. I think it’s because he doesn’t understand what I mean by that. What I mean is, whatever happens, I will be complete whether I am in a relationship or not. I don’t care about labels and I would never want to be in a relationship for the sake of being in one. From this point on, a relationship will be a bonus in my life. Not only because I love being in love but because my happiness and wholeness will not depend on it.

I just want to be happy. Right now, my happiness depends on me and no one else. If I ever had a void in my life, I have succeeded in filling that void with love of myself instead of filling it with someone else. I am complete on my own. I have my own goals that I want to achieve and if I find someone, it will be someone that enhances my life as opposed to completes it. I want someone who I CAN live without but don’t WANT to live without.

I feel really good and look forward to achieving my goals. I also plan to keep nourishing my self love even more. I believe that self love and a mother’s love are both forms of pure love. But, if you do it right and you love yourself first, you can find that pure love with the right person. So, I will always keep my heart open to whatever might enter it… whatever it may look like:)

So, I’m obviously having one of those “a life unexamined is not worth living” times in my life. There have been a lot of changes lately in my life and I’ve naturally been re-examining everything and found that my “old self” is quickly coming back. The old driven, goal-oriented, confident me. Not sure how to explain it, but I have made more goals and realized more opportunities in my life than I have in something like 10 years. It’s amazing, but at the same time so surprising that I could get in a rut for so so long. Don’t get me wrong, I have been busy with kids and a job and marriage but even though I was busy, I became complacent with life and kind of went on auto-pilot. It may have had its benefits but it’s still scary how easily it happened.

So, I just wanted to journal how absolutely excited I am about life right now and it’s all due to evaluating my life and realizing that I could either take the easy road and just keep plugging away at life and let everything control me – or – I could take appreciate change and make it time to create amazing opportunities for myself.

I’m as excited as a terribly excited person who has a really good reason for being terribly excited

“What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.”

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as being able to remake ourselves.”

“Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that’s enough.”

“No guts, no glory”

Believe it!

“Follow Your Gut Feeling”

I know it’s a cliché but the older and wiser I get the more I realize that clichés are clichés for a reason. They are clichés because they are true and people use them so much because they are so true.

“The truth shall set you free.”

When we are young, clichés are just words that go in one ear and out the other because we hear them so much and because they have not become true to us yet. But the older we become, the more we realize they have so much truth to them. I have always tried to live my life by my gut. I didn’t always succeed. Some people might think that little voice in our gut is intuition or God. No matter what you call it, it is the same. It is your heart telling you what is “right” for you.

“Youth is wasted on the young.”

When I think back, my gut never steered me wrong but there were two times I didn’t listen to it. The first time was when I was leaving from a long backpacking trip to Europe and knew I should stay. There was even a “sign” that I should have stayed when I missed my flight. But, I still came back home.

The second time, I’m sorry to say, was when I got married. Everything was telling me to get married. I was comfortable, and everything added up to just get married. But, my gut told me something different. It was telling me that I just wasn’t sure. But it would have been harder to stop the steam train that was speeding down the track. So, I did the easy thing.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

In retrospect, I should have listened to my gut both times. Instead I did what I was supposed to do. What added up. The easy path. What was expected of me. All that stuff:)

So, I must learn from my experiences. And start listening to my gut again. I will not regret my choices in life, I will learn from them. It is unfortunate that we can’t learn from other people’s experiences and can only learn from our own, but it would be even more unfortunate if we don’t learn from them at all. And it is time to do just that.

“It is never too late.”

My gut is screaming at me right now and I must listen to it! It’s telling me that it’s time to follow my dreams. I have an opportunity staring me right on the face and there is absolutely nothing in my way and I just can’t it pass up. And I couldn’t be more excited:)

“A man is not old until regrets take the place of his dreams.”

It is hitting me how much people just don’t surprise me and how absolutely frustrating it is to me that I still manage to react strongly even when I can see what people will do a mile away.

If I can see, in my mind, the actions that each person in my life will take ahead of time then why do I still cry when they hurt me or get angry when they frustrate me? It’s draining. I guess I still hold on to hope that they will do the “right” thing or do the thing that makes sense or follow their heart. Maybe it’s good that I still have faith that people will not do the stupid thing in the end… but it definitely makes it that much more frustrating when they don’t.

Sometimes I wish I could just be surprised by people so maybe the pain and frustration could be a little shorter.

Don’t mean to complain. No one likes a complainer. I just needed to vent. I think it’s one of those things that has probably helped me more than it’s hurt me in life but right now it sucks:)

Happy Holidays:)

So, this blog is turning out to be a place where I can share my “words of wisdom” which really translates to me sharing my mistakes and what I’ve learned from them for others’ benefit. I find myself wishing I had had people in my life that shared their experiences with me so I had “tools” when I made decisions. Like grandparents or parents that were there for me.

Anyway, I don’t want to sound negative because I’m sure good things come out of every failure because we only become wiser with each one.

This time, I want to share the concept of making choices for ourselves. Unless we have amazing parents who have it all down, it seems we all seek approval wherever we can get it. We lacked the approval that we apparently needed from our parents. So the rest of our lives become a fruitless scavenger hunt to find the approval we feel we need to finally be happy. Most people attempt to get this approval by trying to control everything in order to still earn their parent’s or society’s approval. They constantly try to figure out what they’re supposed to do to finally fit into their parents’ or society’s predefined idea, hoping that they’ll get some sense of satisfaction because they did the “right thing.”

This can become a frustrating misdirected mess that essentially is being decided upon by someone else, not you. So, my words of wisdom are that you will never get the approval you seek either from your parent(s) or by society by doing what you think you’re supposed to do. Never. That may seem harsh but a parent and even society will only respect you for doing what makes you happy. Not what makes them happy. They only want to see you be happy on your own terms. The reason for this is because they went through the same thing you did before you and never found the answer themselves. They searched for that answer to happiness by finding approval and never found it. And that is why they rarely or never give their approval, they want their own. So, when they see you actually figure it out on your own terms, they look up to that.

The problem is somehow we must try and see past the need for this approval and see that the only way to be happy is to figure out what we want for ourselves and what might make us happy. But how do we know? We only know what we see or experience already. That’s why the approval of others becomes so important because that is the only thing we have experienced growing up. We need to get out and experience life and see what feels good to us and try to never judge something based on what other people think. Only make decisions based on how we feel and how our hearts feel about them. Listen to your heart.

This is hard to do. It normally takes time to learn this naturally through trial and error. It takes us trying things and finding that nothing makes us truly happy except something we choose on our own with our hearts. This is why I am just now figuring this out. I just hope I have plenty of opportunities to actually put it to practice.

So, good luck, everyone. Really

So, I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff lately and one of the things I’ve thought about is what is really important in life. The way I figured this out for me was to think about the things that were naturally put on this Earth and then eliminate all things that were created or manufactured by man.

As far as I can tell, people, animals and nature things are the only things that were naturally put on the Earth. So, first, those things are the ‘things’ that are important.

So, since we obviously can’t live in a vacuum, I then thought further and tried to think about what traits or thoughts people are naturally born with. Obviously, when we are born we can’t survive on our own so that means, we must have some sort of natural ability to take care of our children so they may survive.

Then, in order to create these children we must naturally know how to procreate. We naturally have a sex drive so we want to procreate. Then in order to procreate we must have the desire to have sex which means we naturally have the ability to fall in love with other human beings. So, that has to be something in us that is important. To find that person that basically ‘turns us on’ physically and emotionally. Which implies that we are born with emotions.

The one thing I am not sure about is how much our emotions are “natural”, how much they are influenced by other people, and how much they are influenced by our environment. I think this is impossible to measure. This is why it is soooo important to be constantly aware of how we influence children, ours or not. My guess, from watching my own children grow up, is that they were born with a framework for their personality that only included the innate ability to feel joy.

The reason I feel this way is because when my kids were babies, they each had very unique things about them but they both naturally laughed at the silliest things. I don’t believe there was any way I had anything to do with either one of these things at such an early age. They definitely had an innate ability to laugh and smile and feel joy. The cat could walk across the room or a toy could drop on the floor and they would laugh and laugh. But, when they cried it was because they had no other way to communicate to me that they were uncomfortable or hungry or sleepy. Definitely not because they were depressed about life!

Now everything else that has developed in their personality has to be a result of either the people around them or their environment.

Does any of this make sense? Basically, my conclusion is that the most important things in life are people and our innate abilities to love and feel joy because those are the only two things that are natural for us. All other things are manufactured. Possessions, success, control, status, ego, hate, envy, depression, greed, work, financial wealth, are all things that have been manufactured by man over time. And therefore they are illusions of our mind and will not ever bring us joy or love. If we took all of them away, all of a sudden, we would all be able to survive because we would still have love and laughter because we would have each other.

So, now what’s important to you?

I am realizing more and more that I am pretty fearless. I’m not afraid to experience new things at all and the more I think about it, the more I realize that I have always been this way.

I’ve never been afraid to:

• travel to new places: I love Spain
• try new foods: alligator’s ok…
• go skydiving: one of the best experiences of my life!
• meet new people and to put myself in unfamiliar social situations: I love crashing parties
• ask stupid questions: how else am I going to learn?
• try different things: I’ve had close to 20 different jobs and I can fix just about anything
• put my feelings out there and risk getting hurt: how else do you find the greatest love?
• learn new things: I love challenging myself intellectually
• join new groups: I’ve played soccer on probably 15 different teams

The bottom line is I have not found anything I am too afraid to try and having that attitude has made huge differences in my life. It has kept me young (not that I’m old yet) and made me wiser.

If you live by your fears then you don’t actually ever DO anything. I would hate to look back on the last 10 years and say I didn’t do any of the things I did. I have enjoyed every bit of it and don’t regret doing any of it.

Now, sometimes I might have gotten a little impatient and jumped in too quickly and regretted the way I did something but none of my regrets involve NOT doing something. That, I would regret for sure because I wouldn’t have learned everything I have by doing.

And… I’ve had a lot of fun doing it, too;)

It’s interesting how quickly we grow when we make the effort to identify and free ourselves from the crap of life.

I just talked to a friend of mine who is in the complete opposite situation as me and I noticed that she is not growing or moving forward at all in life. She has made no effort to change anything and is still in the same miserable situation she was in two years ago. And seems to have no plans to change any of it.

On the flip side in just the past week, by making one change, I have grown in multiple ways that I didn’t even expect and feel freer than I have in a really really long time.

“If you are not moving forward, you are moving backwards.”

First of all I am a ‘rebel’ at heart. Even though I am a rebel deep down, does not mean I have lived my life in that manner. I have basically lived by the rules which has led me to live a very conflicting life. Pretty much every big decision I have made in my life has been made because it is what I should do. I could try to figure out why that is or feel like a victim because of it but it really doesn’t matter from this point on. The truth is that I allowed it to happen but that it’s not too late to change it.

Should is irrelevant in life. Should is what keeps us from growing, making a difference and being happy. Should is what everyone else is doing. It’s what makes us second guess ourselves. Our priorities are our own. No one can define them for us. The furthest away from should that one can get, the better.

I am throwing should away and starting over.

Me, personally, I am moving my priorities around so I can focus on my kids, do something really cool in my career, expanding my circle of friends and then seeing where it all takes me in the world. Those simple things, make me excited about life. Because they are MY priorities. No one else’s. Or rather, I’m not letting anything or anyone define what my priorities should be anymore.

Not taking anymore should from anyone:)