Or was it one of those years that seemed much the same as the year before. For me it turned out to be a great year for personal growth. I started 2009 in the dumps, not really knowing what I wanted to do, but I knew that I had had enough of what I had been doing. I spent much of the previous year feeling lost, unfocused and I hate to say it but depressed about my life even though there was really nothing wrong with it.
At the beginning of 2009 I revisited a course that I could audit for free, a great course that in the past had served me well to refocus myself and get on track to achieve the goals that I had setup within the course. By the end of the course I had moved a little but really didn’t seem to be moving forward in the way that I use to. It seemed that midlife was upon me and there was no real purpose to what I was doing, I whined to friends in a good way saying “I know it’s all me and somewhere inside I have the answer but did not seem to be able to find it.”
So as I did not have a focus or purpose and every idea that I came up with I put on hold after the first few days, because it seemed pointless. I went for a new approach, I gave up all my big ideas for a while and stopped. I did little things that I could handle that gave me joy, peace of mind and had some meaning in the moment. I visited people that I hadn’t seen for a while, did things that I always wanted to do but had not quite got around to. One was to go and visit my family in England, another was to tube down the river that I have lived by for the past 16yrs and kept saying that I would do but never got around to. I went caving at the Horne Lake caves which I had planned to do for about 20 yrs and did it 3 times last summer. The list goes on and on, but I did them one at a time.
I realized talking to friends that I was not the only one in this place; it seemed that there were quite a few others in the same place. I’d had the idea earlier in the year to create a midlife blog and to hopefully help others on their journey and that maybe they could shine some light on the road for me. At this point I decided to hand off all the event’s that I could not deal with or had no control over to a higher power and trust that it would work out the way it was supposed to. This freed my mind of most of the stuff that I had been trying to control; it was like a breath of fresh air. It also left my mind clearer so that a lot of my concerns and worries that had gone with trying to make the world the way I thought that it should be, left me and my world just started to work.
The next thing that I did and I have done in the past, but only for short periods of time is, I asked the universe for what I wanted. Whether you call this law of attraction or asking God for what you want, it works and I think that it works because I let go of trying to have it my way, again I gave up control and stopped fighting with reality and began to love the way things were in my life. I asked for what I wanted and then set it free into the universe and went about my business and was amazed how it turns up. By not having a preconceived idea of how it was supposed to have looked, it showed up in different ways and I was open to receiving it.
Gratitude is something else that I had heard a lot about, but when I was in the dumps it was hard to see what there was to be grateful for, everything had lost its sparkle. Just saying that I was grateful when I didn’t believe or feel it, just like saying affirmations when the next thought is, that’s BS doesn’t work for me. What did work for me was to find three things about the situation that I did believe in. For instance I hate the rain became It will make it nice and green next year, I now have lots of drinking water and after the rains the sun always shines again and cheers me up. I found that I could believe in these things.
One of my biggest learning’s of the year was that my depressed state had been a victim state. I didn’t think I was being a victim. The glum over took me and I didn’t seem to be able to get out of it. I talked to Doctors that wanted to give me pills, friends to see if they could help, and chased after my purpose in life. I realized that it’s a fool’s game thinking that someone or something else outside of me can fix my life. Once I realized that I had a choice at every thought that came into my mind and I could believe the thought or I could find something that was equally as true that was positive, if the thought was not working for me, I could change my world. This did not require the outside world to change, it only require what I focused on to change.
If I start to go into that dark place again, I remind myself that I’ve been there and it not what I want anymore. Sometimes I have had to push myself through, as I want to go back to the comfort zone of feeling down. I don’t really know why because it painful and has nothing that I want in my life other than, I assume that it’s what I have taught myself is comfortable in a painful way and I recognize my thoughts and feelings as familiar.
One of the other big things that I have learned is to take little steps on my way to creating greatness and success in my life. In so many of my endeavours I have made commitments that were to big because I thought that I need to play the game big enough without really thinking it through or knowing what I was getting myself into. I have found that it’s not the big things that make me happy, it’s the little things like a walk, standing in the rain, playing a board game with the kids.
The final thing that I found is that I needed a destination, one that I could succeed at, that I felt good about that didn’t require something outside of me to change. Worldly goals are great and I have a few but learning to be with whatever is here in this moment and finding ways to love it rather than resist it has given me the greatest joy.
As for the year, people and events keep turning up to help me in the most unexpected way. I meet a friend Tim who encourage me and helped me to setup my blog. I got back to doing a few smaller projects in my workshop. I had a great 50th birthday with about 85 people showing up and I found the joy in doing what I was doing again.
2010 is looking like a great year, with a couple of trips planed already. One of which is to assist a course in the Yukon in February near White Horse with one of the First Nations Bands up there and to take part in some of the Rendezvous Festival, There is supposed to flour packing contests, dog sled races, chain saw throwing contests, log cutting & splitting contests, cancan dancers, keystone cops, ice/snow sculpting contests…..just to name a few. And the costumes are 1898 era. The Keystone Cops have been known to arrest Men for not having a beard, and women for not having on a garter within 6 inches above the knee.
I hope you all had a great holiday season and your 2010 will be all that you are hoping for. I have made a list of the key points of my learning this year and hope they will help, and maybe shine some light on your pass this year. For me, I look forward to the journey of 2010 and can’t wait to see what shows up.
- Give the things that you have no control over to a higher power.
- Give up big projects and ideas that are overwhelming and just do little things because they add up to big things.
- Find 3 things to be grateful for when a negative thought comes up.
- Don’t be a victim of your thoughts, you have a choice to find a new truth or thought about a situation that works.
- Take small steps to achieve success and greatness.
- Get a destination, then you might just land there. Plan your destination for you and not the rest of the world.
- Final, use the 4 D in one of my other posts to clean up the clutter in your life so that you have room for something else.
Monday, 4. January 2010
Great post buddy, I don’t even care about the grammar problems anymore, you are talking about the soul and that’s all that matters.
I am trying to accept your wisdom of doing things in little steps, today I did a few little things and I feel a bit better, however I still wish to find something that overtakes me and puts me in the “zone”, where time stops and nothing else matters, just pure intense focus on some creative activity.
I remember the “zone” when I was a kid building model airplanes, but I have not experienced it much as an adult, and I have been searching for it ever since. I miss it.
Monday, 4. January 2010
Tim the “Zone” is a great place to live, however I can’t say I live there most of the time much as I’d like to, however my time there seems to be growing as time goes on. To answer your question, I have noticed that when I’m doing the little steps, I have a good idea of what I’m doing, the skills to do it, I like doing it and there is a challenge to what I am doing. That’s when I slip into the zone without noticing it, until I notice myself thinking about it and then I tend to bring myself out of that state again. I seem to slip into the present moment, were time disappears and I become very connected to the moment. It reminds me of the dream state first thing in the morning just before I wake up and before my mind starts to get caught up in my thinking. I will think about this some more and maybe try and put a post together about it and how to get there. Thanks Tim.