The view outside my windows today is
A Snowy Day Reverie
Everything is covered with a thick layer of wet snow and the snow keeps coming down. It hasn’t stopped the birds from coming to the feeder or the squirrels from coming to check out the ground beneath the feeders. But it’s not a great day to be on the highways. Looking at the MN511 app on my phone this morning, the map looked like this:
I am thankful I have no where I need to be today. Instead I can enjoy looking out at all the snow and beauty surrounding me.
And it is beautiful!
What are you doing on this beautiful snowy day? Are you cursing the snow and wishing it would stop or simply watching it fall and seeing its beauty? We have a choice about how we see things. Sometimes it doesn’t seem that way. But we do have a choice. It’s easy to complain and see the worst. I admit that sometimes that is what I do. But I also keep working on noticing my thoughts and choosing how I see the world.
But we cannot always choose our emotions. So it’s important to allow whatever we are feeling when we feel it.
We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away what you’ve put in your mind.
― The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life
Earlier this week I read a beautiful book by holocaust survivor, Dr. Edith Eva Ever. It’s called The Gift: Twelve Lessons to Save Your Life. In this book Dr. Ever talks about the choices we make and the choices she and her sister made to survive imprisonment at Auschwitz.
Recently I’ve been using some of the ideas from the book as I deal with my anxiety about cataract surgery. Even though the first surgery went beautifully and was far easier than I anticipated I am finding that my sleep at night is still disturbed. And I am dealing with a gut upset that simply won’t ease up. In the night I wake up and find myself going over in my mind what is going to happen, what happened before, what might happen and more. It’s hard not to beat myself up for continuing to experience such stress.
So I keep reminding myself that as Edith Eger says, “a feeling is only a feeling.”
But a feeling is only a feeling. There’s no right or wrong. There’s just my feeling and yours. We are wiser not to try to reason others out of their feelings, or try to cheer them up. It’s better to allow their feelings and keep them company, to say, “Tell me more.” To resist saying what I used to tell my children when they were upset because someone had teased or excluded them: “I know how you feel.” It’s a lie. You can’t ever know how someone else feels. It’s not happening to you. To be empathetic and supportive, don’t take on other people’s inner life as if it is your own. That’s just another way of robbing others of their experience—and of keeping them stuck.”
― The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life
And…
What a beautiful reminder that the things that interrupt our lives, that stop us in our tracks, can also be catalysts for the emerging self, tools that show us a new way to be, that endow us with new vision.
― The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life
Instead of beating myself up about my feelings of anxiety I am exploring them with gentle curiosity and accepting that this is where I am right now.
I’ll end today with one more quote from this beautiful book.
Life—even with its inevitable trauma, pain, grief, misery, and death—is a gift. A gift we sabotage when we imprison ourselves in our fears of punishment, failure, and abandonment; in our need for approval; in shame and blame; in superiority and inferiority; in our need for power and control. To celebrate the gift of life is to find the gift in everything that happens, even the parts that are difficult, that we’re not sure we can survive. To celebrate life, period. To live with joy, love, and passion.
― The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life
May you walk in beauty.
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