Steps forward

2012… Strange to think that we are sitting here at the beginning of a new year. That another one is down in the record books.

My mantra for the year is: “Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” I have been reflecting a lot over the past 48 hours, something about New Years makes you do that for yourself. I realized how much I spent the last 4 months of 2011 working my ass off. 80 hour work weeks, 5 hours of sleep on a good night and barely seeing my friends, hardly holding up conversations with family. It is strange to think how quickly a few days can turn into weeks, weeks fade into months and all of a sudden the year is over.

Now there is nothing I can do about the way I spent those four months, and I am sure that there are many things I missed out on participating in but there are steps I can take now to make sure things change. I realized as I rang in the new year with an old friend and some new found ones how important making time actually is. Making the time, making the effort to share your life with people. Humans are by nature social creatures. I had pretty much eliminated that aspect of my life by limiting my schedule to pretty much work. I did luck out, I found some amazing co-workers who have single handedly helped me maintain my sliver of sanity. But it is also because of them that I want more for my life. I don’t want to just walk through my life anymore, I want to thrive in it.

Right now I am scared out of my mind. 2012 is going to bring new adventures, new challenges. I am about ready to push past any comfort level I have had and reach for something new. Right now I am struggling with that, it is a risk, it is a gamble, it is an all or nothing type of deal. What I am realizing right now however is that it is better to try to have it all and lose than to sit on the sidelines and wonder what if.

Resolutions:

1) Make a life, it is okay to work hard but remember to allow yourself  to live your life. Find my PASSION.

2) Enjoy more, laugh more, love more 🙂

3) Patience

4) Smile every day, a REAL SMILE.

5) Restore faith in myself.

My resolutions are not going to come true over night, they are things I will get to work at everyday. There will be days I fall apart, there will be days where everything seems blurry, but there are days I will succeed, there are days I will exceed expectations. Remember there are always two sides to a coin, a yin and a yang to life. So do what you have to to take the steps forward.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”- Lao Tzu

What will you find along your road?

 

Come along with me on a journey, an adventure, a new beginning 🙂

 

Hope and love

K

Personal Road Trip – Destination Unknown

I meant to post this before I left the airport to fly home for xmas… but seeing as the one airport doesn’t have free internet and I have barely touched my computer since before my vacation this is the first chance I have had… The things in which I was talking about are still true and I am going to make more of an effort to stay up with this. A journey back to being true to myself… here goes nothing.

 

“As I drove four hours this morning to catch a plane I had a lot of time with my thoughts. I had a lot of time to just look at my surroundings. It has become very apparent to me in the last few weeks, maybe even months how much I have stopped taking the time to look at things and wonder. To look at things and get lost in them. The simple things. Like the way the sun comes over the horizon and reflects off the frost covered fields and trees. How a frozen lake offers you a “picture” of the last ripples made on the once glossy surface. I forgot what it meant to me to take that time. How finding the “simple” things in life can offer you a kind of peace that has been lacking.

 

A friend showed me the saying recently, “never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life”. As much as I wish I could say that I was living up to that saying I have actually failed at it. My drive this morning reminded me of that. I work somewhere around 80 hours a week, I have used every excuse in the book. I made commitments to both places, I need the money, got bills to pay, ect. Truth is, I was making it by before, working around 50 hrs a week, yes things were tighter but I was still above the water.

 

Truth is I was using work as a way to escape from the emotional turmoil. In the year of 2011 i have faced a lot of loneliness, I have faced the destruction of relationships, I have watched as the life of someone I held dear was taken from her bit by bit, I was faced with the possibility of a new love to have reality rear it’s ugly head and ensure the relationship would end before it even began. Getting lost in work, pushing myself to give everything I could to my jobs made escaping seem so much easier. And it was for a while. Truth be told, 2.5 months of that pace, after already having a near empty tank was a little too much to ask of myself. I found that the smiling I used to do for no reason at all had disappeared. I became a robot that went from job, to job to home, sleep, and repeat, day after day until they all blurred together. All of a sudden I am packing my bags to head back home for christmas. Why does it feel like I just left the memorial service back in October.

 

The emotional roller coaster I put myself on the past few months trying to convince myself I was fine hurt me more than helped. I keep repeating behaviors that I know do not work for me. And I have found myself believing that I don’t deserve anything good again. How did I get back here?

 

Over the next seven days I am going to take the opportunity to find my strength. To look at the world the way my 17 month old niece does and find the wonder again. I want to find the side of me that randomly smiled, whose heart was full of love ready to be offered to anyone who needed it and the one that realized how important it was to find your passion and follow it. I am on a personal road trip, destination not really known but I am going to find a way to find the beauty and wonder in the journey.”

 While the trip did not offer all that I hoped it would, it made me realize that the journey ahead is not a one day fix, it is going to take time, effort, hard work but I believe that the journey towards that is my true reward.

Onward and upward 🙂

Love

K

Deep Breath

….I breathe in, I breathe out…

For me if someone goes after someone I care about I am more likely to fight with them then if the attack had been thrown in my direction. That truth about myself has become more apparent to me recently. If people want to throw stones in my direction that is one thing, I will take that, however, if the same stones are being thrown at someone I care about it is game on.

I have been asking myself a lot recently how the mama lion will come out for others but not for me. I think that reveals a truth about myself that I have drastically ignored. The reason I will fight like hell for them is because they are just as much apart of what makes me me as I am. The people I have allowed to be close with me in my life are my strength, they are my lifelines and there for I want to protect them. And while I protect them, I also am protecting myself. Does that make any sense?

Recently I have encountered a person whom frustrates me on almost a daily basis and it is someone I have to see a lot. His behavior has always kind of rubbed me the wrong way but up until recently it didn’t bother me to such a degree that I am willing to say something about it.

Everyone has the right to be their own person, express their own opinions and I will not challenge them on it if their views do not line up with mine. However, I do have a problem with someone insulting a friend of mine, and in turn me with his comment, in front of a group of people and thinking that their actions will not come back to bite them in the ass. When it first happened I had to take the moment, take a deep breath and calm myself. For if I had directed an outburst back at him in front of a group of people that would make me no better then him.

I have had two days to think about the best way to handle the situation and have realized that standing up for my friend in this situation is what is best. No one has the right to insult a person behind their back, it truly makes you a coward and it is a trait that I do not understand. And while I am not one for confrontation at all I do believe there are things worth fighting for, and there are people in my life that that rule applies to.

 

So… in moments of anger, sadness, frustration the best thing I can tell you to do is take a deep breath and center yourself. It is in moments of great emotion that sometimes we make our gravest errors. I didn’t want to make an error on behalf of my friend or on my own behalf. I encourage you to remember that when you face a similar situation.

I keep trying to remind myself of that, keep reminding myself that certain battles are not worth fighting. That in the long run they will be nothing more then a faded memory kept tucked away in a corner of your mind collecting dust. But in that moment, in that exact moment where something has sparked such a deep emotion how do you know? How do you know if it is a little thing or a big thing? That comes down to you. What in your life is going to be a defining moment? What in your life are you willing to let go of?

Stopping, taking a moment and asking those questions is the best thing you can do for yourself. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.”

Don’t let someone control you with anger. Choose the path you want to follow all on your own.

 

Deep Breath, Love –

K

Hard Work

Sorry as to my absence to my blog but I have been working almost 80 hour work weeks.

Many have told me recently that I am insane, not to burn myself out. At first it was something I laughed off, but the more people that say it, the more I wonder if they are right AND the more I want to prove them wrong. A double edge sword it may seem.

1. If I try and prove them wrong I very well might burn myself out
2. If I burn out then they were right all along.

Oh the perplexing problems we are faced with.

I always thought if you worked hard it would pay of. If you were willing to make sacrifices it would eventually work out the way it was supposed to. Everything is some how connected to the next. I still believe that. As I get home each night I am faced with new aches, new pains and wonder if what I am out there doing is worth it, is it truly leading me to something more.

I suppose we all stop and ask ourselves that. I can answer with a firm yes, I truly do believe it is leading me somewhere. Is the path clear? No. Are there harder times ahead? Sure. But I believe that through this experience I am learning something about myself. I am learning that the limits I once used to believe I had were not really limits at all. I have blown past roadblocks I never thought I would see the other side of. So I encourage you all to ALLOW YOURSELVES to blow past a few road blocks of your own. Push yourself harder, find out what you are made of.

Will it take some sacrifice? Yes. Will it take hard work? Hell yeah. Will it pay off? I believe it will. It will make you push yourself in ways you never thought you could. It will make you see yourself in a new light. It will allow you to feel more pride in yourself then you thought possible. Take a chance, put your head down and run full force towards something you want, something you have always dreamed of. I can promise the hard work will pay off. And it might not be the way you thought it would but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the way it was supposed to.

Keep your head up and your heart on the horizon 🙂

Love

K

 

step forward

This past week I came upon some information. In an earlier blog I spoke of a relationship that I held on to for too long and in the end it just did us both more harm than good. It was a relationship I realized the depth I could love a person. He was a good man whom I loved very deeply. He holds a special place in my heart.

This past week I found out he was just recently engaged. Now in this situation I always used to assume I would react one of two ways, that I would feel hurt/upset or angry. To my surprise I felt neither. I was taken aback by that which I did feel, genuine happiness for him.

Four and a half years ago when the relationship ended it broke my heart in a way I never expected. I wanted us more then anything to find our way back to each other. It took a very long time for me to realize that all the love in the world could not save us from what happened. That no matter how much we wanted to be, we were just not the best people, the best match for one another.

We haven’t spoken much in the last two or three years. We have parted ways, always one of our choice to find a way to move past the other. It seems as if we finally found our way there. I am very happy for him, I wish him all the happiness in the world.

It showed me today that it is finally okay to take that next step forward. I have my own fault in the ending of that relationship, I know that, but I know I can’t spend forever trying to figure out why love wasn’t enough for us. I can love him enough to let it go, that was the choice I made years ago in the spring of 2007, that I loved him enough to let him go.

And the moment I told him I was happy for him and congrats I realized I loved myself enough to let it go.

 

The moment we decide to take that final step forward is the time we allow ourselves a new freedom and lease on life. If you are in a position where you are holding on, take a step back and look at it in a new way. See what good, what bad it has brought into your life and make a choice. You never really know where that decision will take you, but aren’t you worth taking a chance on yourself?

 

All my love

K

never lost

As I was trying to find a something to write about today I realized that once I got to my second job today I haven’t been able to wipe a smile off my face. It feels as if the tides are changing.

“A day is NEVER LOST when a smile graces your face”

Sometimes it truly is just the simple things that can make your day. Today it was a smile, a smile that has been on my face all afternoon because I got the chance to do something I love to do. I got the chance to push myself, to challenge myself and reach for something more…

What makes you smile in your life? What makes you happy? Easy questions with complicated answers I am sure. They are that way it seems for me most of the time. Today I realized how easy it can be to go to work, to ENJOY what you are doing, and for work to be something SOOOO MUCH MORE. Take the opportunity to allow yourself to risk something. Don’t always play it safe.

Beginning of layering of a cake

For me I got to cook. I got to work on the line prepping dishes. It was my first chance to be in a kitchen other then my own and I realized how much I thrive in that environment. I am excited that I am starting on a new journey, I am even more excited to see where it is going to take me. Do yourself a favor, find your smile every day. Find something that brings the sunshine into your soul. You will not regret that feeling, ever.

 

All my love

K

Certain Sound

Certain Sound- 2006

The thoughts in my head turn,

             round and round…

I am begging to hear a certain sound

Telephone please ring your tone…

Save me from the craziness,

             surrounding my mind…

All I want is to hear you say my name,

                just one more time…

This ain’t a time for games

Cause baby I need you so much

             right now

So telephone, please ring your tone…

As you start to go through old things you find things you had thought you had lost, forgotten you even had… this is one of those things, tucked away in an old journal. Something that I wrote in the middle of a world wind of a relationship… It is funny to look back and see things that people inspired you to write and how it can take you back…

Oh how far I have come from that moment. Proof that life does go on… Proof that just because something was what you wanted at the time doesn’t mean it will last forever. Proof that your past does not have to define your future. Even though the relationship ended badly I wish him well. I think back on our times and smile. And I hope where ever he is he can do the same thing.

Stop waiting for the phone, or pick it up yourself. Go out and inspire yourself. Go out and seize this moment. Go out and live this life with everything you got.

Love

K

no rain… no rainbows

When I woke up this morning I looked out the window and saw the sidewalks and road glistening from a fresh rainfall. This got me to thinking about how much we can either dread the rain or enjoy it. Two years ago I went on outside during a rainstorm with a good friend of mine… and this is what I wrote… I found it today and feel like it holds the same meaning…

Playin in the rain, never had so much fun,

whether we are just dancing or going for a run,

let it wash away the worries, tuck away your pain,

give yourself a smile, go dance in the rain…

A good friend of mine once told me, no rain…no rainbows and all I could think this morning was how true it was. After having to say good bye to a loved one, after the bad that has been surrounding my life over the past few years, I realized how true this statement is. Without the big thunderstorms I would never have taken the time to truly appreciate the beautiful rainbows that have come to pass as well.

So take a moment, celebrate the good with the bad, smile in the face of a storm, enjoy the sunshine on your skin and tell the ones you love that you hold them dear. More people will tell you they regret the words they didn’t say. Don’t wait too long, you never really know.

The last of the sun poking over the foothills

Smile big

love

K

To say good bye

For the better part of the past month I have been waiting on a phone call telling me that someone I love has passed away. Even in the moments where you know that someone’s life is about to end how can you fully prepare yourself for that moment, for that phone call that tells you they are gone.

For me it was about taking advantage of moments to say the things I needed to say, to spend moments with her when I could.

After I graduated from college I didn’t move back home, I decided to stay in a place that was 900 miles away from my family. Little did I know that with that choice I would be missing out on the last year of her life.

When I found out that in April her diagnosis went from bad to worse I started to wonder what I could do. In July I made the trip home to spend her birthday with her. 28 hours behind the wheel to see her for 90 minutes. I would make that drive all over again just to see her smile and give her one more hug.

In August when the prognosis went from worse to terminal it was a matter of time. In that moment, how do you prepare yourself? How do you keep going knowing in the back of your mind the phone call is going to come? For me it meant writing her a letter, it meant telling her what she gave to me, it meant saying good bye. I got the chance to tell her all the things she taught me. She made my life richer, better, and gave me gifts I could never repay. My biggest goal was making sure that she knew that.

I believe that she did. And I also know now that she is no longer in pain. The last few weeks to hear of the amount of pain she was in, it is a great relief to my family and I that she is at peace.

 

It is hard to say good bye to people you love, it is hard to know that in the coming weeks, months and year we will have so many firsts without her around. The best thing that we can do is celebrate the person she was to us, to remember the laughter and the beauty that she filled our lives with.  I plan on trying to pass on some of the lessons she taught to me as best as I can…  Anyone who is struggling with a similar situation remember that you are not alone, that the people you love are with you even after they are gone, they are alive in you. Keep your heart full of love. Enjoy the sun, the rain, the clouds and the stars… they all make up the important things in life 🙂

Stuck

I have been sitting here at my computer for the last hour trying to figure out what to write. What to say. So much has been going on recently. Things that get you stirred up emotionally and leave you stuck in a certain place. It is in that place that i try to put pen to paper, or in this case fingers to keys. It has me thinking about how I used to coup with things, how I used to handle my stress, and the person I used to be.

To look back and evaluate yourself, to look back and learn from yourself is the best way to grow in your life. To realize your own flaws helps you to grow. There are moments I get stuck on my emotions, days where it is a struggle for me to be happy because I know that someone I deeply care about is suffering so much. Cancer is taking her cell by cell and there is nothing I can do about it. I just know the amount of pain she is in on a day to day basis, watching/hearing about her deteriorate is taking its toll on my family and I, not to mention what it is doing to her. So here I am writing, or trying to write the lesson I am learning in this situation.

When you are feeling stuck, when you are thinking about everything going insane around you, take a step back. Take a deep breath. Start to find your center, whatever gives you some balance. Call an old friend who makes you laugh and catch up, listen to music, take a temporary reset by having a nap, look at a sunset, be amazed at the little things in life. It truly is short; hours turn into days, days turn into months, months turn into years and before you know it so much has been left unsaid, and undone. Seize the moment is what I have learned over the past year and a half. People can die slowly or unexpectedly, you may get the chance to say good bye or you may never have the chance.

Where is your place? What is your center?

I am going to try and live my life making sure the ones I hold dear know how I feel about that, know that they meant something to me in my life, whether they were apart of it for years or days or simply hours, they helped to define me. I am thankful for that.

Remember that everyone gets stuck, everyone has bad days, everyone makes mistakes… it is what we do after them that defines us. It is never too late to hit a re-set, to re-evaluate your life and to start living a life you love to live. It isn’t an easy road, but then again seldom of what is great in life is easy.

 

Be good to each other

Love

K