facts of life
No, this isn’t a post about a bad 70’s tv show. Rather, I sat down tonight and wrote down the facts of my life right now as I know them. Not as I want them to be, not as they were at some point in the past, but right now.
I also left out any judgmental phrasing. I simply stated the facts, regardless of how I feel about them: I do such and such for work, I do martial arts, I garden, I have pets, you get the idea. The list was surprisingly short, I expected it to be longer, but it seems the important things about myself fit on a single sheet of paper.
Take work for example: I simply put down what I do for work. I didn’t write anything about how I feel about my work. At times, it’s been good, at times not so good. I didn’t put down the judgment that for the last few weeks I’ve hated my job so much I can’t hardly stay through the entire day, that I’m almost ready to quit, even without anything else to take its place.
It’s hard to look at some of the things on the list, even though I know they’re just temporary, just circumstances. Some things I think are good, others aren’t. but those are judgments that get in the way of me seeing clearly what is happening right now. Before I can change things to be how I want them, I need to see them as they are, without labels, without emotion.
I guess I’m still learning that lesson about not assigning a value to what’s going on, learning that lesson on how to go with and not saying something is good or bad, just letting it happen and seeing what’s availsble from where I’m at. Improvement may be gradual, but things will improve as I allow them to and help them to improve.
My next exercise is to take those statements about my reality at the moment and write next to them how I want my reality to be in the future and start setting some goals in that direction. I feel like I’m bottoming out, not because everything’s going so terribly, but because I’m becoming aware of what’s really happening and how I feel about it. So it seems worse than it is, but I know that this is the worst of it, and that while there may be storms ahead to weather, I’ll be a lot better off because I’ll know exactly where I am and where I’m headed.